SHELBY — Three local high school students, two from Crawford County and one from Richland County, were recently recognized for their engineering project to design lighter-weight, energy-efficient cook stoves with materials available in Malawi, Africa.
Buckeye Central seniors Carter Bishop and Trevor Reed, as well as Clear Fork senior Justin Leach, attended the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. in April. They received Honorable Mention in the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 design competition against 37 other teams from colleges like Purdue University, Auburn University and Princeton University.
“Which is a big thing for us because I think we were the only two-year college,” Bishop said.
Leach, Reed and Bishop worked on the project under the instruction of Ken Ekegren, assistant professor of engineering technology at North Central State College, while involved in NCSC’s College-NOW program.
The College-NOW program allows high school students to study at the Kehoe Center during their junior and senior years and earn their associate’s degree upon successfully completing the program. So these three students earned a two-year degree before graduating from high school.
When Ekegren told his class about a project to improve the Malawians’ cook stoves, Reed, Leach and Bishop stepped up to the plate. They began working on the project during spring semester of 2015.
“We had the design down pretty much within one semester,” Reed said.
They sought to improve the original cook stove model that was created by some of Ekegren’s former students by enhancing the manufacturing process and making the stoves easier to transport.
“The original (cook stoves) were like 40 or 50 pounds, and these ones are only 25 pounds,” Reed said.
They built the prototype during fall semester and were able to take the prototype to Kanyenyeva, Malawi in January thanks to a $15,000 grant awarded by the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s People, Prosperity, and Planet program.
They spent two weeks in Malawi researching the various local materials that could be used for the cook stoves and worked to improve the design and manufacturing process.
“We actually had to change our clay mixture a little bit because these ones had material called vermiculite that we used in the clay, but it was hard to come by vermiculite in Africa,” Reed said. “So we actually used ground up peanut shells instead of vermiculite in the clay.”
The stoves, also known as rocket stoves, are efficient in that they enable the Malawians to use less firewood (a limited resource in Malawi) and ultimately help the environment through the reduction in emissions and reduction of the impact on their natural resources.
The stoves also provide a way for the people of Malawi to earn money.
Ekegren and his wife Penny first visited Malawi in 2009 during a mission trip with First English Lutheran Church, where they attend church. First English Lutheran Church has played an integral role in aiding orphans and their caregivers in Kanyenyeva through the Malawi Orphan Care Project.
In 2011, Ekegren heard about rocket stoves and thought the people of Malawi could benefit from this device, so he and a team of students worked together to create some for the Malawians.
Ekegren took the cook stoves to Malawi in 2012 and showed the villagers how to make them. During his most recent trip to Malawi this January, he noticed that the villagers were still using the stoves — four years later.
Ekegren has applied for additional grant money in the amount of $75,000 to further enhance the cook stoves. He said some College-NOW students are already working on a prototype that would generate enough electricity to allow people to charge their cell phones — an appealing feature considering Malawians often have to travel a couple miles to do just that.
The grant would also help fund a trip to Malawi and a few other African countries, including Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, where Ekegren and his students would introduce locals to this new cook stove design.
