A team of Dartmouth undergraduates who designed and built "SanoStove" won Fall term's Phillip R. Jackson Award for best overall performance in ENGS 21: Introduction to Engineering. SanoStove is a smokeless stove to reduce dangerous cooking conditions for communities that lack access to electricity.
The winning team—Margaret Frazier '25, Sophie Goldberg '25, Abby Hughes '25, Sara Magdalena Gomez '25, and Alda Zeneli '25—worked together along with their TA Jhujhar Sarna, and MShop instructor, Joe Poissant.
"The SanoStove team took the initiative to understand combustion and was not afraid to learn SolidWorks, welding, plasma-cutting, and more! They also spent time reaching out to users around the world to get their thoughts and feedback, which they incorporated into their designs," said Professor Vicki May.
"Our all-female group wanted to solve a problem that largely impacted women, and ultimately chose to focus on innovating for rural communities with access to water and wood-fired stoves, but not electricity," states the team's project website. "Many of our primary designs included carbon filtering systems and mechanical fans, as a reaction to the smoke outputted by the wood fire. With our final prototype, our team decided to shift to a more preventative solution, employing the use of the secondary burn, or clean burn method in the SanoStove.
"The secondary burn method includes primary air entrance slits at the base of the SanoStove, accelerating initial combustion. As heat and smoke work their way up the chamber, the secondary air entrance valves on either side of the conical device introduce new fresh air. This preheated air is then reignited at the site of the hollow steel tubing surrounding the circumference of the top of the device. In the end, the secondary burn mechanism increases efficiency, provides a more complete combustion, and significantly reduces smoke output from the SanoStove."
The Jackson Award is based on the following criteria:
• Societal importance of the selected problem • User-centered design considerations • Sophistication of the design and degree of difficulty • Functionality and testing of the prototype • Holistic approach to the engineering design process • Consistent outstanding performance on both written and oral milestones
