3D Printing Cookstoves in Nepal. OK. Wait… What?
Lessons from prototyping and product development for humanitarian products and local makers in Nepal.
Imagine… You’ve got a great idea for a new iteration of an innovative product, one that could benefit millions, you know what it should look like, you know that it can be made, but actually getting it made is proving virtually impossible. That’s the situation that Mr Madhukar KC, inventor and social entrepreneur, found himself in. He called Field Ready to get his industry-leading prototype made.
Field Ready were able to help Mr KC and, at the same time, identified a significant gap in skills and capacity that is potentially holding back industries and businesses in low-resource contexts around the world.
Read on to find out more.
The story starts when Field Ready was approached in early 2016 by a local entrepreneur, Mr Madhukar KC, trying to develop a new product to improve the efficiency of solid-fuel improved cookstoves — a low-tech, formed clay, dual hob stove with a basic chimney. The product developed is a thick, 6 inch diameter, shaped metal disk with holes in and ensures that airflow is clear and constant, therefore making the fuel in the fire burn hotter and cleaner.
The goal was to increase the efficiency of the solid fuel improved cookstove by 18% to meet government efficiency targets and thereby unlock contracts and the potential to bid for tenders. We offered digital design support and 3D printing to produce models, iterations and initial prototypes. The challenge addressed was the lack of local manufacturing capacity focused on rapid prototyping and realizing new, impactful designs.
When he approached Field Ready, Mr KC had already been developing the product for a long time and the disk was good, achieving 17–18% efficiency gains when installed in the improved cookstove. However, he had some more ideas for its development. Prototyping of the product was impossible locally because of its complexity. Typically, he would have carved his design out of wood and given the pattern to a sand casting firm to make in metal. However, his most recent design had outstripped his ability to make the pattern. That is where Field Ready came in with digital design skill and the ability to 3D print the prototype in hard plastic.
Product Development
Field Ready were able to interpret his idea and create a CAD model of the burner, before 3D printing it. The 3D printed pattern was delivered to the sand casting factory and then used to make sand moulds for casting the final product.
The complexity of the new design was challenging. It was a decade in the making, becoming more and more complex with each iteration. The highly engineered shape of the disk allows for efficient airflow and clean burning and yet only costs $4 cost per unit to produce, after all, it is a single cast-metal disk, albeit with an unusual shape. The 3D Printed mold and its design optimizations helped to overcome local craftsmanship and manufacturing limitations at very low cost, enabling new ways to use traditional, local sand-casting techniques.
The 3D Printed positive of Mr KC’s complex burner design is optimized for sand-casting and post-casting processing like the drilling of air holes. The 26.8% efficient design for Mr KC’s ostensibly ‘simple’ idea was achieved on its 23rd iteration. Field Ready have since worked to increase the potential of 3D printing enabled production more widely in Nepal and have developed iterative design processes with partners and samples being tested in the field.
The air supply disk has been recognized by development sector leaders, like UNDP Nepal, and is installed in tens of thousands of improved cooking stoves throughout Nepal, allowing families to have a cookstove inside the home with much reduced harmful smoke emissions and fuel consumption. The product helps address major health and environmental sustainability challenges, which disproportionately effect rural women, as 4.5 million households in Nepal use wood/fuel for daily cooking. This unique, cheap disk improves the improved cookstove for a cleaner, more efficient burn without a fan or stove unit (a cost issue for many rural families).
Field Ready, as a humanitarian organization, supported Mr KC, a private entrepreneur, to develop this product because of its huge potential for impacting the lives, environment and economic circumstances of millions of Nepalis. Mr KC offers his products to households at cost price and his social enterprise ‘Maitribhumi Udyog’ installs the improved cookstove with air supply disk anywhere in the country for $20 USD using female-led teams of local installers.
Independent testing of the final metal casts demonstrate an increased burn efficiency of up to 26.8%, smashing the government requirement of 18%, which means the 3D printed mold has enabled the production of burners eligible for government and public works contracts and tenders. Madhukar has won contracts for the production of 210,000 burners, with 15,000 installed so far, all based on the design that he and Field Ready developed together, leading directly to the employment of 20 production staff and dozens of ancillary staff.
Mr. Madhukar KC is motivated by a social goal — this amateur inventor has dedicated the last 10 years to his idea of a simple and cheap burner disk combined with an improved cookstove to reduce wood consumption and harmful smoke in the houses of Nepal. Field Ready aims to support him and other entrepreneurs like him, in Nepal and in other countries, to have a beneficial impact for millions.
The combination of Field Ready’s cutting-edge technology and skill with the ancient, traditional Nepali techniques of sand-casting means that users can spend less on fuel, less time collecting firewood and have lower risk of respiratory problems. The technology means the burner is the best it can be. The traditional techniques mean it can be scaled up massively and cheaply. All made in Nepal.
The air supply disk developed with Mr KC has informed Field Ready’s approach to the development of the 3D printing sector in Nepal and illustrates the potential for the synthesis of leading-edge and traditional technologies. Digital design and 3D printing can seem far removed from village life in Nepal, but the impact of the air supply disk for families of rural Nepal is tangible in the savings and health benefits they experience. This collaborative approach has been able to achieve great outcomes and, with the methods pioneered in Nepal, Field Ready is confident that the approach can be replicated, developed and improved to have a global impact.
While Field Ready were able to solve the immediate prototyping problem for their partner we also identified an unserviced niche for digital manufacturing technology and skill. This one product design project led to Field Ready’s DFID-funded, 2017–18 Frontier Technologies Livestreaming project to support the 3D printing sector in Nepal, which has achieved further great successes in developing the 3D printing sector and pioneering approaches in humanitarian digital manufacturing.
According to WHO, roughly three billion people cook and heat their homes using solid fuels (such as wood, charcoal, coal and dung) in open fires and leaky stoves. Most are poor and live in low- and middle-income countries. Mr KC is developing new designs and is in the process of patenting his current designs in Nepal and India. Mr KC says:
‘I am from a rural background. This disk is for people like me and my family. It reduces smoke and has other benefits. I did not develop this product to get rich. I want all the people of Nepal to benefit from this product and to make their lives better.’
Field Ready’s DFID-funded Frontier Technologies Livestreaming project continues to support the 3D printing sector in Nepal. Read more about the FTL programme, Field Ready and our work on 3D printing in Nepal.
