Waterjet Aids Research Efforts
Rapid Prototyping, Parts Fabrication, and Versatility in Solving Research Challenges Among Host of Benefits Realized as Lab Produces Cook Stoves for Developing Nations
The mission at Colorado State University's Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory (EECL) is to create innovative energy solutions and entrepreneurial models which benefit the human condition and achieve global impact. The EECL has a 15-year history of delivering significant, meaningful solutions to meet the global energy challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, providing its students and researchers the experience and tools for a lifetime of contribution.
 With a focus towards market driven solutions, products developed at the EECL, in partnership with its industrial sponsors, have reduced pollution in the atmosphere by millions of tons and have saved over 14 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
EECL's research focuses on fuels, energy conversion, and energy distribution, with applications concentrated in transportation, air quality, indoor air quality, village energy systems, and distributed energy. The University's global field resources allow the Lab to test and refine applications for the global marketplace such as the development of safe, clean burning biomass cook stoves for use in developing nations.
"More than three billion people, roughly half the world's population, cook in their homes using traditional fire and stoves, burning biomass fuels like wood, dung and crop waste," said Mac McGoldrick, programs manager and research anthropologist at the EECL, part of the Colorado State University department of mechanical engineering. "Day in and day out, for hours at a time, families breathe in lethal fumes from these cooking fires. Indoor air pollution currently claims the lives of 1.5 million people a year worldwide, or one person every 20 seconds. Women and children make up the vast majority of these deaths due to their increased exposure in the home."
To address the challenges and save the lives of millions, EECL has partnered with Envirofit International to engineer a line of stoves that will greatly reduce indoor air pollution.
"In our research, we build and test a large number of prototype stoves – all of which we build on site," said McGoldrick.
 The greatest challenge in developing these stoves is the need to quickly create prototypes of the stoves, and then fabricate parts to build the stoves. McGoldrick said the department learned about the benefits of ultrahigh-pressure waterjet technology and decided to implement Flow International’s WaterjetPRO 2031 waterjet cutting machine. As a result of the waterjet, the EECL now can perform rapid prototyping of test stoves and then fabricate stoves for installation in developing nations.
"The waterjet has been a wonderful tool in this research, and has helped us accelerate the development schedule," said McGoldrick. "The time required to build these research models would be much longer if not for the waterjet. We are able to fabricate test stoves much more quickly using the waterjet – it takes approximately 4 hours using the waterjet compared to 2-3 days without the waterjet – or more, depending on whether we could do everything we needed in house."
McGoldrick said that while the waterjet was first brought in specifically for the stoves project, they are now finding it to be an invaluable tool for all their work.
"While our first interest in the waterjet revolved mostly around the stoves project, we’ve found that the waterjet is invaluable to all projects in the lab, and have used the waterjet to cut materials for all manners of projects and purposes, such as cutting steel, wood, Styrofoam, plastic, iron, granite, and other materials."
The versatility and ease of use of the waterjet has been a benefit to students in being able to resolve research and engineering challenges.
 "The waterjet has really provided a great assist in the education of our students. We have a large number of students trained to use the equipment, and nearly all of the students have, at one point or another, designed a part to be cut on the waterjet. It has also helped students to think creatively about how they address certain engineering and research challenges – knowing that they can fabricate the necessary components for a test. We conduct a lot of tours and host quite a few visitors each day and the waterjet lab is one of the coolest stops – everyone is quite impressed by even the scraps we have lying around."
McGoldrick said that while they use the waterjet on almost all the projects that operate out of the EECL, other departments have been requesting to use the waterjet as well.
"We've had people from other departments ranging from chemical and biological engineering to the art department, ask to use the waterjet. We are one of the only university research facilities in the world with the capability to work on large scale engines (~2.0 megawatts) – and have used the waterjet to fabricate as many of the necessary parts as we can, which saves cost and time during research. Last year, a professor from the art department used the waterjet to create a sculpture for her gallery exhibit – a beautiful and intricate lighting fixture."
Overall, McGoldrick has been extremely pleased with the waterjet, stating "the waterjet has proven to be invaluable to our entire operation!"
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