Grassroots Innovation: Multi-Utility Fuel Efficient Stove

The National Innovation Foundation (NIF), India, was established on Feb 28th 2000 by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). The main goal of NIF is to provide institutional support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots green innovations and help their transition to self supporting activities.
NIF has been supporting and incubating a number of interesting innovations over the past many years. We aim to showcase some of these innovations here as part of an ongoing series called ‘Grassroots Innovation’.

Multi Utility Fuel Efficient Stove

This article is about an interesting innovation called the “multi-utility fuel efficient stove”.

A stove is still the most widely used device for cooking in large parts of rural and semi-urban India. This domestic product has huge social signifance. However, it is also a reason why a majority of rural women have breathing-related disorders due to inefficient burning of kerosene. These stoves also lead to huge loss of fuel.

This is where Mr. S. C. Joe’s invention comes in. 56-year old Mr. S.C Joe has 32 years of experience as an Industrial electrician in the fields of air conditioning & refrigeration , solar equipment. He still pursues experiments to build devices using his experience in heat exchange. Mr. Joe has shown that there really is no age bar for innovation.

His latest innovation is called the Multi-Utility Fuel Efficient Stove. The stove has a burner, boiler and water regulator. It’s innovative features are:

• Minimal Loss of energy
• Cooking can be done for 14 hours in one litre of kerosene.
• Smoke free and vapour free
• Heat lost from the sides is absorbed by a built-in boiler from which steam and hot water can be trapped.
• Possesses an inbuilt water jacket for Steam Generation.

Thus the stove makes optimum use of the fuel and the energy generated from it. The steam jacket can withstand high pressures and has been tested for a pressure of 200 kPa (double the atmospheric pressure).

The Stove is available in single, double & multi-burner units depending on requirement. Clearly, such grassroots innovations have the potential to bring about far-reaching positive impact!

Previous Grassroots Innovation here.

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