For much of the world’s population, gathering fuel to cook food is a dangerous proposition. Women and children often journey miles from their homes to collect sticks and branches, exposing themselves to sexual assault, other violence and wild animals.

Inside homes across the developing world, smoke from open cooking fires and polluting cookstoves is estimated to cause and lead to a wide range of illnesses.

A more efficient and clean wood-burning cookstove — developed by the Vashon Island-based non-profit in close collaboration with ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ mechanical engineers — is expected to reduce the amount of fuel those families need to collect or buy by as much as 55 percent. It will also reduce the exposure of these women and children to the harmful particulate pollution produced by traditional cooking flames.

The new wood-burning cookstove will be manufactured in factory in Nairobi, Kenya beginning this summer — thanks to a recent $800,000 investment from and — and sold across East Africa.

“If women have to collect twice as much wood to cook their food, then they’re spending less time raising themselves out of poverty,” said , UW associate professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the Department of Energy-funded at the UW.

“There is no real proven model for a natural-draft stove that’s efficient, looks nice, can be reliably produced and is affordable to people living in deep, deep poverty — we think this is a viable solution where no others really exist.

Compared to traditional cooking methods that balance a pot on three stones surrounded by open flame, the “Kuniokoa” cookstove is expected to reduce by 67 percent harmful particulate pollution that increases the risk of contracting asthma, heart diseases and other health problems.

It’s the first production stove to emerge from a partnership The collaboration pairs the UW’s deep expertise in combustion, fluid dynamics and heat transfer research with BURN Design Lab’s experience in designing clean, efficient and affordable stoves that are practical and popular in the developing world. The project’s third partner is the .

“What we really focus on is the usability of the stoves,” said BURN Design Lab founder and BURN Manufacturing CEO Peter Scott. “They need to be durable, they need to have a wide diameter so people can put large family pots on it. We include a tray to collect the ash so people don’t have to pick up the whole stove and shake it out, which is a really messy experience.”

The UW researchers and partners are continuing to develop a next-generation Tier 4 wood-burning stove — the highest ranking on the ’ scale in terms of efficiency and fuel use, total emissions, indoor emissions and safety.

The UW engineers are working on transforming a laboratory prototype that hits those metrics into an affordable production stove that can be manufactured in Africa.

“Our stoves are similar to concept cars or an F1 vehicle,” said, UW professor of mechanical engineering and co-principal investigator.

“We build systems that were never designed to go anywhere near the field because they’re too delicate and are not durable, but they tell us what’s required to get super high performance. Then we take those lessons learned and talk to BURN about how they can incorporate these ideas into their hardened and field-ready designs,” Kramlich said.

For now, the wood-burning stove that launches this summer will be sold to farmers and plantation workers on Unilever’s tea estates in Kenya and Tanzania, at a cost of roughly $35 U.S. dollars.

As a bonus, it will also be manufactured locally in Kenyan factory, which employs roughly 100 people who currently produce a separate line of clean-burning .

“This stove will be made for Kenyans, by Kenyans,” said Scott. “All the other modern cookstoves are made in China and, while there are artisanal stoves made in Africa, nobody else has a modern manufacturing facility of this kind in sub-Saharan Africa.”

For more information, contact Posner at jposner@uw.edu or 206.543.9834.

A recent published in The Lancet estimates that 3.5 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from open fires or rudimentary stoves in their homes. More than 900,000 people die from pneumonia alone, which has been linked to indoor air pollution.

ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ engineers hope to make a dent in these numbers by designing a cookstove that meets a stringent set of emission and efficiency standards while still being affordable and attractive to families who cook over a flame each day. The team received a $900,000 grant in September from the U.S. Department of Energy to design a better cookstove, which researchers say will use half as much fuel and cut emissions by 90 percent.

“We are taking a holistic approach to designing a stove that will be clean and efficient, and also meet the needs of the people who are cooking,” said project lead , a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering. “Our goal of bringing cleaner wood-burning stoves to the developing-world market can only be met if we have an attractive product that meets key price and usability needs.”

The health risks and environmental impacts from solid-fuel cookstoves have only recently been studied and documented. In 2010 the United Nations Foundation, kick-started by then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, launched the , a public-private partnership that is trying to get clean cookstoves and fuels to penetrate 100 million households by 2020.

In addition to creating an efficient stove, the UW researchers will also develop software that will allow other cookstove designers and manufacturers – especially those in the developing world – to test different elements as they make stoves to fit the needs of various communities around the world.

“The goal is not to just generate a design that is copied, but to provide a tool that allows others to design more efficiently on their own,” said , a UW professor of mechanical engineering who is leading the project’s combustion testing and modeling.

Modeling can be used to screen a large number of design ideas and find those that offer the highest payoff, Kramlich said.

Health factors aren’t the only issues with poorly designed cookstoves. Inefficient stoves also have environmental impacts, including contributing to deforestation and global warming through added particulates in the air. They also fuel gender inequality, Posner said, because it’s usually the women in each community who spend hours each day collecting wood and are exposed to smoke while cooking.

The UW-led team signed a contract with the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and plans to start the three-year project this fall. The team includes a variety of organizations with different specialties, including on Vashon Island, Wash., global health nonprofit in Seattle, and in Berkeley, Calif.

At the UW, engineers will try to reduce smoke emissions and improve efficiency while designing a stove for East African communities that is inexpensive to manufacture. This will cut down on the amount of wood needed to cook and improve the air quality for families using the stove. The design likely will have simple parts and use natural drafts to move air through the stove, Kramlich said.

Perhaps most importantly, the stove must be familiar enough in design so people will want to use it, said Peter Scott, founder of Burn Design Lab.

“While there’s a place for high-tech stoves, for Africa and the developing world it’s important to have a robust design without a lot of moving parts,” Scott said. “Having this partnership will directly translate to a finished product in the market in three or four years.”

Designing cookstoves that are good for human health and the environment – and that take into account the social and economic needs of each community – is an interdisciplinary feat, Posner said. He hopes the UW can develop a research institute that brings in many departments and schools such as public health, sociology, law, business and medicine to tackle the problem.

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For more information, contact Posner at jposner@uw.edu.