Students at heart of latest Envirofit technology

A "spirit of collaboration" among faculty and students at CSU's engines lab led to the newest clean-burning stove technology. Photo of Tim Bauer, Nathan Lorenz, Morgan DeFoort, and Ron Bills, Envirofit CEO

Work gets done the old-fashioned way at Colorado State University's Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory: People sit around the table and talk to each other.

Sounds simple enough, but Morgan DeFoort, co-director of the lab, says that spirit of collaboration among faculty and students at Colorado State University is what led to the newest Envirofit International stove technology unveiled in July, which provides an alternative to the dangerous cooking fires that kill 1.6 million people each year in the developing world from indoor air pollution.

Bryan Willson, lab director and CSU mechanical engineering professor who started the cookstoves program, is co-founder of Envirofit. Now DeFoort, who first joined the lab as a master’s student in 2000 and will receive his doctorate this summer, leads the team of undergraduate and graduate students who developed the proprietary alloy for the cookstove’s combustion chamber as well as the orifice plate that helps the stoves reduce smoke and toxic emissions by up to 80 percent.

The EnviroFlame Combustion System, the heart of the new line of Envirofit cookstoves, is a combination of the alloy and orifice plate. The alloy adds significant durability to the stove and the orifice reduces dangerous emissions.

The CSU Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory serves as a subcontractor to Envirofit, which obtained a $25 million commitment from the Shell Foundation to design, build, and disseminate 10 million cookstoves to the developing world. The work in the lab can go from idea to design and implementation overnight. In this case, students developed a prototype using computer software, cut the steel pieces needed for the stove on a water-jet donated by Flow International, and tested emissions from the redesigned cookstove — all within a 24-hour period, DeFoort says.

"Bryan brought the problem into the lab and laid a huge amount of foundational work," says DeFoort. "He challenges us and questions us and keeps pushing us for improvements."

That student-faculty collaboration has paid off. The Colorado State University Research Foundation, along with Envirofit and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has a patent pending on the technology. DeFoort, Willson, assistant mechanical engineering professor Anthony Marchese, and graduate student Dan Lionberg are listed on the patent application.