approach -- clean stove

although both teams had similar (basic engineering) approaches to their projects, I want to give them each their own space.  I’ll do my best to elaborate a little bit on what each team did without boring you to death or being too repetitive.  today:  the clean stove team.

Andy, Carly, Dan and Robert took this approach, more-or-less in order, for the clean stove design:

1. defined and weighted important design specifications – the team came up with 24 different design specs that they would use to design and evaluate their concepts.  they picked energy consumption as the top criteria, followed closely by function/performance, and considered noise radiation, operating instructions, and quantity to be the least important considerations.
2. researched cultural conditions and material availability in Guatemala – the team made local contacts who had lived or spent extensive time in Guatemala and enlisted them to aid in the understanding of what a family would need, would be willing to pay, and could expect to find available there.
3. divided the overall system into four main components (power source, combustion chamber, heating interface, and exhaust system) – this allowed the students to evaluate and pick from among various concepts for each main function.
4. researched different stove types available – the team provided a benchmarking report that discussed nine different high-efficiency stoves utilizing different combinations of the components mentioned above.
5. benchmarked separate components and overall stove designs -- power source ultimately focused simply on wood, though the team discussed five other alternatives.  initially, ten combustion chamber arrangements were considered.  six heat transfer devices/aids and three different flues were also investigated.
6. compared and evaluated best design concepts – in order to narrow down the field of potential concepts, the team evaluated multiple stove designs against the 24 design specifications established at the beginning.  they rated each one and used the weighted scores to select the final contenders.
7. built prototypes – once they thrifted the investigation to two main concepts, the team built two working prototypes for further work.
8. tested prototypes – the “rocket stove” and “TLUD” stove were tested for temperature, burning efficiency and general performance.  (more details on what these are in a later post)
9. selected final design concept – in the end, the team decided to go with the “TLUD” stove concept due to better performance and cultural/logistical concerns.
10. modeled key performance elements mathematically (combustion, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics) – general efficiency variables included fuel metering, temperature, insulation, re-ignition of escaping smoke, oxygen, input velocity, firewood configuration, and draft. 
11. built final product – as of this writing (4/11/13), the first of the final products was built and tested last night, with varying degrees of success.  future posts will give more details.