Our Design Process

 

University of Pittsburgh Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Team #1 

Allison McCurdy, Eric Matthews, Matthew Sanders, John Bates

September 2013 thru December 2013

 

Project team scoped out the need for a stove by travelling to the San Blas Islands in October 2013 and conducting interviews with Kuna people on three different islands:

• Cangrejo Island (crowded inland island with pumped fresh water resources),

• Icodub (cleared, sparsely populated hotel island, no pumped water resources), and

• a third island (remote, sparsely populated, no pumped water resources, looking to promote boating tourism.)  

 

​All islands have issues with trash build-up from freighter waste dumping into the Pacific, and all island Kuna engaged in indoor cooking practices which exposed the cooks (mostly women) to hours of particulate-heavy smoke inhalation within the cooking huts, ubiquitous among the Kuna Yala.

 

Intially, the team proposed to design and fabricate a trash-fuelled rocket stove containing a water chamber, which would serve as both a heat exchanger from the fire to the hot cooking surface and would also provide water purification.  Water purification would occur from a lengthy boiling process, making it conceptually possible to ingest fresh groundwater.  

 

The stove project scope and design requirements were narrowed after visiting the islands and were geared towards addressing only the issue of indoor cooking smoke inhalation.  Many interviews were conducted with the Kuna to understand their traditional cooking, fire-starting and fire-fuelling practices.  The process is as such:

 

1) Arrange wood fuel into a bicycle spoke

    arrangement,

2) Place a piece of styrofoam in the center,

3) Use a match to light the styrofoam. 

4) If flame is not long-lasting enough, place 

    additional plastic into the center (plastic 

    bag added in demonstration pictured here.)

5) Place dried coconut husks over plastic-

    fuelled fire to start longer lasting flame.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the very smoky fire this process starts,

the Kuna place a pot of water with leaves or 

soup to cook, and they hang tobacco leaves

and lay fish on a grate above the fire to

smoke in the open, smoky air of the cooking

hut.

 

With the intention of making our stove 

deisgn as useful and appealing to the Kuna

as possible, our design parameters were re-evaluated to include a smoking mechanism in addition to a hot cooking surface.

 

To this end, Senior Design Team #1 design and fabricated the following non-functional prototype of the Kuna Yala Stove:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This design was intended as a model to be improved in the following ways:  

• Make structure out of steel 55-gallon drums,

• Develop a fabrication process that could be completed in Panama, given the existing resources,

• Change the design such that the Kuna "bicycle-spoke" fire arrangement can be maintained while maximizing stove wood fuel use efficiency and smoke ventilation

 

University of Pittsburgh Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Team #2 

Kevin Laux, Michael McClune, Brendan McKinley, Kathryn Saltsman

January 2014 thru April 2014

 

The main focus of Senior Design Team #2 was to design and fabricate a functional prototype based on the recommended stove design improvements established by Senior Design Team #1.  The design was revamped to be constructed of two, 55-gallon steel drums, with an increased capacity for smoking foods and adaptation to fit over a typical Kuna fire arrangement.

 

The functional prototype components and assembly are shown below: