Butterfly Expo

March 31^st 2008

Today AMADER (the Malian Agency for Domestic Energy and Rural Electrification), the group who financed the development of the Butterfly so far, had a demonstration for a department of the Ministry for the Promotion of the Woman, Child and Family. The object of the demo was to highlight the link between energy and the family. AMADER asked that I bring the Butterfly and Helios and do some cooking.

Here we are setting up the Helios on the edge of a soccer field. Once the mirrors started going up their curiosity got the better of them and they put the game on hold to come hang out while we set up the machine.

Some of the adults were concerned that the children would burn themselves with the Solar Fire, but teaching the kids some solar safety was easy, even if we didn’t speak the same language. The trick is to get them to put their hand in the focal point, but not at the point of most concentration. They exclaim and withdraw their hand, surprised by the heat. Then you get them to put their hand back in and slowly move towards the point of maximum concentration… they don’t get very close. Then you burn a stick and the message is clear.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to organize any baking of cake, but gathering the ingredients to make a nice pot of rice wasn’t hard. Note the rolling boil we’ve got going on. That’s about 5L of liquid and 1.5kg of rice, plus some veggies and beef.

The ladies from the ministry were mightily pleased. Two of the biggest advantages they see are time saved gathering wood out in the bush and improved cleanliness. Cooking on a fire leaves the pot all black and sooty, which dirties hands, clothes and dishwater while solar cooking leaves the pot as clean as when you started (except if you burn the rice, which we almost did…)

Now granted I’m a little bit taller than the average Malian woman, but the ergonomics of the machine are still quite acceptable for women here. Traditionally, cooking is done on the ground over a fire, and overcoming cultural inertia is never easy, but a number of the women we’ve talked to have said the equivalent of ‘so what if I can’t cook on the ground if I don’t have to go gathering/buying as much wood?’

Now we’re going to embark upon more expensive testing and fine tuning of the Helios bread oven as well as the Iron Butterfly designs.

Meanwhile, administratively things have stalled a little bit. I had left the association to do its thing while I do tech development but their follow-up on the contacts we’ve made has been less than satisfactory. I’ve put my hand back in the mix and we’ll see how things progress over the next couple of weeks, at which point important decisions will have to be made.

High hopes, as usual.

And in this... field...

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me the pleasure of introducing to you, the (temporarily named) Iron Butterfly!

Weighing in at a hefty 51kg, the Iron Butterfly has a reflective surface of 1.8m², and at an elevation of 370 meters above sea level is capable of boiling 4.5kg of water in 30 minutes while INcoming SOLar radiATION (insolation) averages 701 watts per meter squared. *deep breath* Built with 100% locally materials costing a total of 41,305 francs, roughly equal to 90$ Canadian, the Iron Butterfly will soon be showing off it's culinary capacities, it's cooking qualities and last but not least, it's 178 painstakingly positioned mirrors.

Thank you mister boxing announcer, sir, but to write the rest of the blog in your style would be silly, not to mention hard. How does a boxing announcer present scientific data like

and then explain that windspeed was constant at <2m/s, ambient temperature was 37degC and there was 4.5kg of water in the pot?

Right, so, as you've heard the Butterfly has had it's first test flight since we've come to some sort of stable design. It is a lot of work to build, and is heavier than I would have liked, but it is rock solid and durable.

I'll give a brief rundown of the construction process. You should already be familiar with the mold. Around the mold we have built a jig, which allows us to place the lengths of square tubing in the same place every time.

Upon the mold we place the mirrors, face down. In the center of each of the mirrors we place a square of sheet metal to which we have welded a small iron rebar stub. We then lay the lengths of square tubing on the jig and then weld the stub to the square tubing.

The result is the Iron Butterfly wing, minus the mirrors.

Apply glue to the wing.

Apply the wing to the mirrors.

Apply the wings to the structure, and then apply sunlight to the Butterfly and...

Voila!

Back in the saddle, such as it is.

Phew.

After having been thoroughly destabilized for a couple of weeks, and then after having scrambled to catch up, I am back in the saddle, such as it is. My cough is back to its normal dust-and-smog clearing and my mind has found some sort of balance.

Hereunder I catch up a little on the situation reports.

While I was sick I took a day on-work and accepted an invitation from the Mali Folke Center for Renewable Energy (MFC) to come see a village 60km outside of Bamako that will eventually be home to one of their ‘centers of excellence’ a place where techniques and technologies will be taught and shared for the economic, environmental and social benefit of the surrounding villages.

MFC organized the National Forum on the Environment from a few weeks ago. At the Forum I met the director of MFC, and we clicked pretty harmoniously. I met with him a couple weeks afterwards and we determined that we have the same vision and that we must work together, so he set up the trip to the village.

I went, saw things of interest, and then continued being sick. They asked me asked me to get the ball rolling by writing up some initial thoughts and cost estimates on a project which they want to hire me to pull off. They want to empower women and farmers through decentralized, low tech solar thermal. They want mango farmers, onion farmers, tomato farmers et al. to have access to crop dehydrators which would allow them to conserve their produce and sell it off-peak season (in some cases half of the seasons crop goes to waste due to overabundance in-season and the inability to conserve it).

They also want a series of technologies which will serve the needs of Shea nut growers, who produce Shea nut butter, which has a number of nutritional and cosmetic benifits. The nuts need to be boiled, then dried, then heated and mashed. Here they are being boiled:

The difficulty is that the Shea nut season coincides with the rainy season, and so unless they have concentrated solar energy, they often have trouble properly drying the nuts, since they leave them out to dry and before they are dry the rain comes along. Additionally, smoke sometimes lowers the quality of the product, and the women have to spend hours a day hunting for wood or spend thousands of francs a week on wood.

I have just recently submitted my documents to MFC and hope to have an answer soon.

Soon to be blug: thoughts on crop dehydrators, agricultural economics in Mali, advances and specs of the butterfly, my new pad and hopefully, the MFC

p.s. due to some class-A bungling I lost the pictures for the last couple of weeks. L

No worries, all better.

Hi everyone, sorry to not have posted sooner but I'm no longer sick and have been scrambling a little to catch up... forgot to blog that I was better.

No worries for now, plenty on the horizon, I'll sitrep soon.

bye

Downtime

Hi all, just wanted to drop a line to break the silence.
Since the salon last weekend I've been down with the flu.
Not much activity to report, but soon I'll post some details about the future, about which I'm pretty optimistic.