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| Designing an eco-friendly stove |
| A team of foreign students with the plant oil-based stove they designed.
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| INDIA
, 11-May-2007
3:7:42 AM |
| What's cooking? If you ask Veronie, Swie, Susan and Bjorn, four students from The Netherlands, the answer would be a plant oil-based stove that they designed with the help of a small-scale industrial unit at Ekkattuthangal.
Outside the TANSTIA-FNF office on Wednesday evening, the group along with the staff of Servals Automation, tinkered with the stove, which started to burn with a hum.
"We came here on a project to improve on a stove design that has provision to run on both kerosene and plant oil. We never imagined that we would end up designing a new stove," said a smiling Susan Oudshoorn, a student of Delft University of Technology.
The prototype, which solely uses plant oil and was in the making for the last three months, is just the beginning of achieving `rural energy independence,' said managing director of Servals Automation P. Mukundan.
According to sponsors L-Ramp (a joint venture initiative of Rural Innovation Network and IIT-Madras), it was the market viability and social impact of the project that prompted it to fund the initiative. "We were attracted by the theme of `rural energy independence'," said James Rajanayagam of Rural Innovation Network.
The project could potentially benefit women in rural areas by freeing them from the burden of fetching firewood and other fossil fuels. The effort would also help to arrest further damage to environment while providing employment to those interested in extracting oil from jatropha, pungam or neem, experts said.
Of course, the prototype needs fine-tuning, said Bjorn-Evert. "They [Servals] need to improve efficiency of the stove, reduce its external temperature and bring down the price," he said.
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