A traditional three stone cooking fire.
Mechanical engineers design efficient boilers and engines for power plants and automobiles.
Some engineers even design microwave ovens and different types of stoves that you find in homes. Using their knowledge about heat transfer, combustion, and materials, engineers can design a cheap, reliable, higher efficiency cooker that could have a major impact on reducing fuel wood consumption and on reducing the severe problems associated with the destruction of forests. This project gives you a chance to think about ways to design an improved cooker, to create candidate cookers, and to test your ideas. Your basic task is to design, fabricate, and test a simple cooking system, which will boil water quickly while burning a minimum of fuel, using only the materials indicated below. You will need to prepare the newspaper fuel in some way such as tearing it or crumpling it into balls.