TRIPLE C (CLEAN CLAY COOKSTOVE)

Our innovation of providing simplified clay 3D-printers to local craftsmen to produce clean cookstoves in sub-Saharan Africa addresses cooking health related issues, environmental degradation, poverty and unemployment. Due to tariffs imposed on imports, and due to production limitations, many of the current solutions for biomass cookstoves have come to a halt. This creates a profitable and sustainable business opportunity for communities to locally produce their own cookstoves with the aid of additive manufacturing technology. Antithetical to the common supply chain systems of delivering masses of stoves to people in need, our paradigm is based on supplying only solar-powered clay 3D printers that fabricate the stoves on-site with locally sourced clay. It is similar to giving people a shovel to make their own bricks rather than transporting the bricks to them. The value chain of the stove project transcends its importance as an indispensable product to job opportunity, market and economy.

According to the World Health Program, around 3 billion of the world’s population do not have access to clean cooking facilities and still rely on solid fuels (wood, animal dung, charcoal...etc) for cooking and heating. The fuels are burned in extremely inefficient and highly polluting stoves. One of the world’s greatest environmental health risk factors is exposure to emissions from these cooking stoves.

• Cooking related household air pollution in general leads to 4.9 million premature deaths annually. That is more than the mortality rate of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. 

• Household air pollution accounts for 12% of ambient air pollution globally – 84% of which is from households in developing countries.

• Indoor air pollution is responsible for 2.7% of the global burden of disease. For example, 50% of pneumonia deaths in children are due to household air pollution.

However, simply supplying cookstoves is an insufficient solution to the larger scale economic issues facing those employing biomass burners. Our model focuses on the creation and support of self-contained stove production facilities run by local entrepreneurs. While our technology is boundary pushing, we have developed systems to leverage traditional pottery knowledge and experience into successful 3D ceramic production.

Our innovation focuses on the design and deployment of a ceramic 3D printed smokeless wood burner stove to address household air pollution in developing countries where biomass is the prime fuel for cooking and heating. This project weaves a dynamic relationship between the creative practice of additive manufacturing technology – a process by which digital 3D design data is used to build up an object in layers by depositing material – and simple innovative ideas that have the potential to actively serve the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

The 3D printed clay cook stove is a naturally drafted top-loading stove with secondary air injection. The 3D printed clay cook stove utilizes a passive recirculating air injection mechanism to reduce smoke and ultrafine particle emissions and to enhance combustion, leading to clean and efficient performance. By leveraging additive manufacturing technology, this stove project adopts a simple and efficient process of onsite manufacturing and distribution.

Cognizant of the universal health, economic and environmental challenges that are associated with the lack of inefficient cooking facilitates, we propose this project to provide clean cooking stoves for the internally displaced persons (IDPs) and inhabitants of refugee camps as well as for the masses of rural Darfur. In the long run, the initiative will extend beyond Darfur and Sudan to include Sub Saharan African and other developing countries.

Since 2003, the Darfur region has been the site of terrible violence, rape, death, and displacement. More than 3,000 villages have been looted and burnt down and more than 2.5 million have been displaced. Today, most people of Darfur are either long-term internally displaced persons (IDPs) or refugees in neighboring countries. Without basic critical infrastructure services, these camps remain mired in systemic poverty. Access to capital is brutally scarce as Darfur harbors a complex interplay of vulnerable communities and national allegiances. Nearly 100% of the inhabitants of these camps and rural areas use biomass for cooking. Women’s exposure to gender-based violence in their efforts to collect firewood is a continuous issue — so any stove that addresses and reduces the consumption of wood should be a precious commodity.

Entrepreneurial opportunities are critical to the creation of more self sustaining economic recovery and growth in developing countries. What makes the Clean Clay Cookstoves an effective step towards solving a global health crisis is far more than its technical function. Our project is not just designed in partnership with local communities and businesses but is also led by an individual who grew up in Darfur cooking on an imported efficient cookstove. A technology which has long since broken down and disappears from his community due to a lack of ongoing supply chain support.

The 3D printed clay stove embodies four key breakthrough innovations:

 Air recirculation (passive air injection)

Localized material sourcing (clay)

Additive manufacturing

Localized supply chain system

In addition to the huge cost offset and logistical merit of this model, we also argue that locally made products by locals from locally sourced materials will be better welcomed by users and do not require behavior change - a huge factor that has compromised many innovative clean stove projects.

The most relevant stove to our project is the Berkeley-Darfur Stove. This stove, which was prototyped by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, was manufactured in India as flat kits before being shipped to and assembled in Sudan. Over 47,000 fuel-efficient wood-burning cook stoves were distributed to women in displacement camps in Darfur, Sudan. Due to the imposed tariff by the government of Sudan on the imported materials, the project struggled to sustain its operation in Sudan and ultimately ceased. Our ceramic 3D printed cookstove, which will be primarily manufactured onsite by locals with locally sourced clay, would cost around $5- $10 (Berkeley-Darfur Stove costs $20). By localizing manufacturing and material sourcing, the 3D printed stove circumvents these challenges not only in Sudan, but it would be a paradigm to follow throughout the developing world.

Utilizing additive manufacturing technologies for the production of the stove means minimizing waste. In traditional manufacturing as much as 10-15% of the materials used may be wasted and go to landfill or require further operations to be recycled. In the fabrication of stoves, material must oftentimes be cut, milled or otherwise subtracted from. 3D printing greatly reduces the amount of mold material traditionally used in casting. Because 3D printing uses only the material it needs, there is no waste. No toxic materials are used in the manufacture of the stoves.

The clay  3D printer has allowed us to efficiently produce a new type of customized ceramic smokeless wood burning stove. By leveraging additive manufacturing technology, this stove project adopts a simple and efficient process of onsite manufacturing and distribution. Before 3D printing, it was extremely labor-intensive, if not impossible, to manufacture the necessary delicate system elements for such a high-efficiency low smoke stove in clay either by hand or through casting processes. The 3D printing process bypasses several of the steps involved in traditional production, which include molding, form making, extraction, casting, making it possible to go directly from file to fabrication and greatly reducing the costs associated with these materials and making it a much more environmentally friendly method of manufacture.

As a pilot project, we are planning to deliver approximately two thousand stoves along with learning programs and training workshops that teach people to use 3D printers, harvest local clay, and manufacture the stoves.

Our goal over the next 5 years is to manufacture and distribute 200,000 clay cookstoves. This will accommodate 200,000 families (more than one million individuals). Field research conducted in Darfur shows that women spend up to 18 hours per week in gathering firewood. It is estimated that IDP families who buy fuelwood spend $0.80 daily on sourcing fuelwood.8 Given the projected efficiency of  our initial tests (50%),  the 3D printed clay cook stove could save each household $146 annually or 624 hours of labor effort for those who collect fuelwood, leading to a substantial increase in disposable income and time. The saved time and money translate to an estimated payback period of less than a month (25 days) for one 3D printed stove. The stove costs around $10 USD. 

If we dispatch one million pieces and equip every family in Darfur with a clean clay stove over the next 10 to 20 years, we would save $146 million annually for the region (there are about one million families in Darfur based on the 2017 census - 9,241,369 people). Implications of the full adoption of the 3D printed clay cook stove throughout Darfur would save 370 M kg (0.37 M tons) of fuelwood per year. That is 0.185M tons of elemental carbon (wood is 50% carbon by dry mass). In CO2 terms, that is 44/12*0.185 = 0.7M tons CO2 worth $7 million annually (the social cost of carbon dioxide in Sudan is estimated at 10 dollars per ton)9.

we project to server 5 million people in the next 5 years

Our goal over the next 5 years is to manufacture and distribute 200,000 clay cookstoves. This will accommodate 200,000 families (more than one million individuals).

Adoption of the stove by locals

Lack of training / technological barrier among local communities

Vulnerability of the technology

Adoption of the stove by locals

One of the major challenges is the sustainability and cultural barriers to scale. Cookstove projects have been trying to achieve the same aim for upwards of 40 years. Their failure has rarely been due to technology, but instead an issue of behavior changes and lack of attention to sustainability. The essence of our paradigm, however, is not to impose solutions, but rather to help with tools, training, and access to technology. Ultimately, local people will develop what works best for them with the assistance of our platform.

Lack of training / technological barrier among local communities:

The implementation of this project comes with a package of workshops and training programs that we have already developed. These programs include training local individuals on basic skills (i.e. running and maintaining the machines). We have also developed an intuitive design app for 3D printing ceramics with features that enable any user without any 3D computer-aided modeling skills to customize the stove design.

Vulnerability of the technology:

Additive manufacturing via paste extrusion (ex. clay) is a very new technology. However, it has undergone rapid development and improvements over the past 5 years. We are collaborating with the leading manufacturing company of clay extruding printers, 3D Potter, who will supply the printers and their parts. The collaboration also includes continuous maintenance and technical support.

5 full time staff

Team Lead: Ronald Rael

Rael is a professor and Chair of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley. His research connects indigenous and traditional material practices to contemporary technologies. Rael oversees research, design and implementation.

Research Specialist, Implementation Lead: Logman Arja,

Arja is a Fulbright scholar and educator from Darfur. He teaches design studios and seminars at UC Berkeley. In addition to the clay stove project, he has spent the last four years developing research on additive manufacturing technology at Emerging Objects and the printFARM lab at UC Berkeley. He coordinates with Sudanese authorities and agencies as well as stakeholders in Darfur.

Tina Piracci, Project Lead:

Piracci is a Master of Science in Architecture student and research affiliate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory studying the properties of 3D printed ceramics. Piracci received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in 2017 from University of South Florida with a concentration in ceramics and three minors in: electrical engineering, digital fabrication and entrepreneurship. She has worked as a product designer for SpyGlass technologies and has years of experience in prototyping and implementation.

Sandy Curth, Design/Software/Hardware development:

Curth is a leader in sustainable innovation for additive manufacturing and current a phD candidate in computation at MIT. For the past three years he has conducted ongoing large scale 3D printing research as a designer and software developer at Emerging Objects. He holds a Bachelor of Art  in architecture with minors in Astrophysics, Anthropology.

Emerging Objects

An independent, creatively driven, 3D Printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments, and products. Emerging Objects is a lead organization contributor to implement the stove project in the capacity of computation and fabrication. The Company formally agreed to contribute its resources, research, and expertise to help implement the project 

3D Potter

A leading manufacturing company of potterbots (ceramic 3D printers). We have been collaborating with them for some years. The company will supply the printers and their parts as well as continuous maintenance and technical support.

University of Khartoum

The Faculty of Architecture and Faculty of Engineering at University of Khartoum, Sudan. They will host and facilitate workshops and training programs. They will also mobilize resources (students and faculty members) to Darfur to contribute to the manufacturing and distribution of the stove.

Malam Darfur Peace and Development 

Is an organization founded by the people of Darfur and operating locally in peace-building and reconciliation. The organization has committed to host our activities and help us to coordinate with local and traditional potteries. 

Host communities and local potteries (local entrepreneurs)

Key partners in the implementation and fundamental stakeholders. We have already identified more than 50 traditional pottery and clay pot makers in several villages across Darfur who will be housing the initiation of our program. Logman Arja, who is a native Darfuri, was able to tour and examine these potteries around his village and across the region.