Page 22 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

Fig. 2. The author visits a thermoacoustics laboratory at the Sustainable Energy Research Center located at Phranakhon Rajabhat University in Bangkok, Thailand. At the center of the photo is Professor Woranuch Jangsawang and at the right is her graduate student, Surachai Supperm. One year after that visit, Jangsawang and Supperm had successfully con-
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structed and tested a clone of the Ben & Jerry’s thermoacoustic ice cream chiller.
people cook with biomass on roughly 600 million stoves (not stoves really, but small open fires with three stones on which to balance a pot). If the average lifetime of an improved cook stove is 3 years, then an industry capable of producing and distributing 200 million cook stoves each year would be required. In 2009, roughly 100 million cell ‘phones were pro- duced worldwide.
From research toward the development of a policy consensus
Nobody at the State Department was interested in cook stoves when my group of Jeffersons arrived in fall of 2008. There was work related to distribution of stoves in refugee camps that had been tried by the US Agency for International Development, but their experience with attempts to provide “improved” stoves was not encouraging. One USAID study of “improved” cook stoves provided by NGOs as part of a humanitarian relief effort for residents of internally dis- placed-persons camps in the westernmost region of Sudan (Darfur) found the following: “Stove performance tests con- ducted by the evaluation team revealed that one stove consis- tently seemed to consume significantly less fuel than the tra- ditional three-stone fire; several performed slightly better or slightly worse than the three-stone fire; and one stove consis- tently consumed more fuel than the three-stone fire. Fuel efficiency did not increase proportionately with the cost/design sophistication of the stoves tested.”27 With the exception of China, improved cook stove projects in other countries were also judged to be failures.
By October 2008, there seemed to be several pathways to address the portion of this problem that might involve the U.S. and ASEAN. I was fortunate that there were two cir- cumstances that made the next steps happen very quickly: The first was that ASEAN has a Committee on Science and Technology which includes a Sub-Committee on Non-
Conventional Energy Research (SCNCER). The second was that the Jefferson program included funds for Fellows’ travel related to their State Department activities.
SCNCER facilitated immediate identification of individ- uals in each member country who could provide me with guidance regarding the interest in improved cook stoves within ASEAN and who could comment on the potential value of a workshop I was contemplating to assess the current state of improved cook stove development and to scope the opportunities for improvement. U.S. embassies were able to set up meetings for me with SCNCER country representa- tives J.C. Ho (Singapore), P. Sardjono (Indonesia), and H. Mokhtar (Malaysia), as well as with Prof. N. T. Kim Oahn, a Vietnamese national teaching at the Asian Institute of Technology (Bangkok). She agreed to host the Workshop and showed me her cook stove lab and the excellent (and afford- able) conference facilities and campus housing (hotel) accommodations.
I spent an entire month in Southeast Asia during that first trip and had the opportunity to visit the ASEAN University Network Secretariat at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok as well as visit and present technical colloquia on thermoacoustics as part of the State Department’s “public diplomacy” efforts (see Fig. 2). These academic visits were enjoyable for me since there is a natural camaraderie among academics that was not part of official visits to government agencies. It also provided the embassy personnel who accom- panied me with access to those academic institutions. I met with members of the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, and offi- cials in various science and technology related government agencies that are similar to our National Science Foundation in four countries. I learned about their interests and research infrastructure and solicited their reaction to a cook stove workshop.
I was also fortunate during the same trip to be a member
18 Acoustics Today, April 2011