Rahul Anand | February
28, 2011
The National Innovation
Foundation (NIF), India, was established on Feb 28th 2000 by the Department of
Science and Technology (DST). The main goal of NIF is to provide institutional
support in scouting, spawning, sustaining and scaling up grassroots green
innovations and help their transition to self-supporting activities.
NIF has been supporting and
incubating a number of interesting innovations over the past many years. We aim
to showcase some of these innovations here as part of an ongoing series called
‘Grassroots Innovation’.
This article is about an interesting innovation called the
“multi-utility fuel efficient stove”.
A stove is still the most widely used device for cooking in
large parts of rural and semi-urban India. This domestic product has huge social
signifance. However, it is also a reason why a majority of rural women have
breathing-related disorders due to inefficient burning of kerosene. These
stoves also lead to huge loss of fuel.

This is where Mr. S. C. Joe’s invention comes in. 56-year old
Mr. S.C Joe has 32 years of experience as an Industrial electrician in the
fields of air conditioning & refrigeration , solar equipment. He still
pursues experiments to build devices using his experience in heat exchange. Mr.
Joe has shown that there really is no age bar for innovation.
His latest innovation is called the Multi-Utility Fuel
Efficient Stove. The stove has a burner, boiler and water regulator. It’s
innovative features are:
- Minimal Loss of energy
-
Cooking can be done for 14 hours in one litre of kerosene.
- Smoke free and vapour free
- Heat lost from the sides is absorbed by a built-in boiler from
which steam and hot water can be trapped.
- Possesses an inbuilt water jacket for Steam Generation.
Thus the stove makes optimum use of the fuel and the energy
generated from it. The steam jacket can withstand high pressures and has been
tested for a pressure of 200 kPa (double the atmospheric pressure).
The Stove is available in single, double & multi-burner
units depending on requirement. Clearly, such grassroots innovations have the
potential to bring about far-reaching positive impact!
Source: This story is taken from http://www.thebetterindia.com/2517/innovation-multi-utility-fuel-efficient-stove/
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