“I always had a dream of being part of a team, innovating, or designing something new.” – Cledden Obeng-Poku Kwanin
The EcoPot project aims to support communities around the world who use open fires to cook their food and heat water. The main goal of the project is to design a pot that specifically uses and conserves heat from fires in the most efficient way possible, thus saving the one billion people who still gather firewood for basic cooking the time and energy it would take to gather additional firewood. This will also decrease deforestation and smoke pollution.
This is an often neglected area of research, as modern pots are designed with modern stoves in mind. However, there are many differences between using a flat stove, which puts heat directly against the flat bottom of a pot, and a fire, which warms the air around the pot in order to heat its contents. The EcoPot team hopes to highlight the differences between these heating methods and the subsequent, necessary changes to fire-heated pot designs.
Inventor Highlight: Cledden Obeng-Poku Kwanin
A crucial member of the EcoPot team, Cledden Obeng-Poku Kwanin, is a mechanical engineer from Ghana who has tested various pot designs for the project using OpenFoam simulations. After completing his bachelor’s degree in engineering and volunteering with other engineering-related groups, Kwanin joined Public Invention to fulfill his passion for innovation.
“The reason why I did mechanical engineering was to build stuff,” Kwanin stated. “I always had a dream of being part of a team, innovating, or designing something new.”
After an interview with Miriam Castillo, Invention Coach Robert Read connected Kwanin to the EcoPot project, to which he continues to contribute. As the most senior current volunteer on the EcoPot team, Kwanin described the development of this project from its initial conception to its current form.
The EcoPot’s Design
Spherical Base
The initial idea for the project came from Read’s frequent visits to museums. Kwanin described the original spark of inspiration, which came from the unique, spherical shape of ancient pots.
“Currently, for the stoves that we have, it’s more practical to have a pot that has a flat base. But when you go to a museum, most of the pots have a round bottom; it’s almost spherical at the base. So, that got [Robert Read] thinking; if it’s hot gasses that are heating [the pot] up, then if it had a more bullet shape, it [would be] easier for air to flow around it,” Kwanin said. “We’re making a pot that has that kind of shape, so that the gasses can flow easily around it and stay in contact with the base of the pot for longer times.”
This spherical design has proven to be highly beneficial for heating pots over open fires. During a three-and-a-half minute trial of the design under the same heating conditions, the spherical base heated water an estimated 12°C hotter than a flat base.
Conical Lid
The design was so successful that the team extended this bullet-shape to the lid of the pot as well. This allows the heated air to flow smoothly over the top of the pot, rather than dispersing over a flat lid as wasted heat.
“If you have a more conical lid, then when [the heat] gets to the tip of the pot, it continues flowing smoothly until it gets to the end. But if it’s flat, then it just goes straight up, [or creates turbulence],” Kwanin said. “We also ran simulations [and] tested a flat pot with a conical lid, and the conical lid performed, I think it was, five degrees better than the flat lid.”
Heat-Transfer Fins
Beyond this bullet-like shape, the team added an additional design currently used in devices ranging from radiators to rockets: heat transfer fins. These fins increase heat transfer by allowing heat to flow inside conductive metal. Despite their prevelance, Joe Alexandersen and Ole Sigmund were the first to apply them to pots. The EcoPot team utilizes this well-tested idea to transfer more heat from the hot flue gases of the fire to the pot. A team of undergraduates at Rice University helped test the addition.
“[Read] introduced heat transfer fins to the base of [the pot. They are] basically just flat pieces of metal, and he just attached them to the base of it,” Kwanin said. “After he did that and performed the experiment, he realized that he used 40% less fuel to heat up the same quantity of water.”
Future Developments
“[The EcoPot] is nearing completion, but there’s still a lot of work to be done on it. If anybody wants to join, I think they will have fun.” – Cledden Obeng-Poku Kwanin
While the inclusion of a spherical base, conical lid, and heat transfer fins are settled aspects of the pot design, the team is still developing the finer details of the pot in order to provide the most optimized final design possible. Thus, the team is currently split into two sections: the designers, including Gianluca Skirde and Marie-Cheynour, and the simulation testing team, including Kwanin and Ivan Urdiales.
With their continued work in view, Kwanin is optimistic that the project will soon come to completion. After the team finishes the final design, Kwanin looks forward to its distribution and the possibility of publishing a paper on their work and findings. He also invited anyone interested in the project to join its final stages.
“[The EcoPot] is nearing completion, but there’s still a lot of work to be done on it. If anybody wants to join, I think they will have fun,” Kwanin said. “You might not really think it’s that hard, but it takes a lot of work to design it. The simulations also take a lot of computation. So, there’s a lot of things to be learned from the project, and there’s also a lot of support amongst ourselves.”
The EcoPot is an example of the importance of highlighting the unique problems that different communities face, including those in rural and low-income areas. Additionally, Kwanin’s story highlights what is possible in the open-source world, with its unique opportunities to invent new, life-changing devices and face problems that are often overlooked. Kwanin shared that he was glad to have worked on the EcoPot, and looked forward to developing future, innovative ideas as additional open-source projects. Ultimately, it is the passion and creativity of inventors like Kwanin, and the efficacy of projects like the EcoPot, which continue to make the open-source movement, and Public Invention, possible.