The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Designing an eco-friendly stove

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 10, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Designing an eco-friendly stove

Sandhya Soman

Foreign students join hands with a city unit

INNOVATION: A team of foreign students with the plant oil-based stove they designed. — Photo: R. Shivaji Rao

CHENNAI : 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.

Will it work? "Of course," say the students in chorus. "If we, foreign students, were able to create a stove with whatever material we could get hold of, then what is stopping local manufacturers?"

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