Three billion people worldwide use biomass daily for cooking, endangering health, climate, forests and biodiversity. Extensive solutions have been proposed in the literature to reduce the wood usage by increasing the efficiency of the cooking stoves. The major challenges faced are: cultural inertia to change, budget limitation and technological sophistication. This document examines if the wood-savings achieved in Rajasthan India through Mewar Angithi (MA) insert can be replicated in rural Kenya. MA local prototype construction and testing in the field was done. Analysis of field data and heat transfer simulations were performed. The achievement of 66% savings in firewood usage indicates the feasibility of this low-cost, low-tech solution to rural areas in Kenya and eventually in the rest of the Sub-Saharan region.

Currently, about 2.7 billion people across the world still lack access to clean cooking means. Humanitarian emergencies and post-emergencies are among the most critical situations: the utilization of traditional devices such as three-stone fires have a huge negative impact not only on food security but also on the socio-economic status of people, their health and the surrounding environment. Advanced Cooking Stoves may constitute better systems compared to actual ones, however, financial, logistic and time constraints have strongly limited the interventions in critical contexts until now. The innovative, low-cost Mewar Angithi insert for improving energy efficiency of three-stone fires may play a role in the transition to better cooking systems in such contexts. In this paper, we rely on the Water Boiling Test 4.2.3 to assess the performances of the Mewar Angithi insert respect to a traditional three-stone fire and we analyse the results through a robust statistical procedure. The potentiality and suitability of this novel solution is discussed for its use in critical contexts.

In this paper, the degradation processes of commercial supercapacitors aged at 2.7 V and 65 °C for 2000 h were studied. The crystallinity, thermal stability, and specific surface areas of the carbon electrodes of the supercapacitors were measured. Significant changes and degradations in the carbon electrodes were observed for the aged supercapacitors. New functional groups were also found on the surface of the electrodes. The degradation of the lattice structures and the reduction in the specific surface area were as well observed for the aged supercapacitors. It was suggested that the aging of supercapacitors significantly changed the electrode surface which affects considerably electrical properties and functionality of supercapacitors. We have also performed experiments which suggest that the aging effect on the electrode is not uniformly distributed through its length.

This paper describes a novel ultracapacitor made from carbon nano-onions. Characterization of the material was performed including measurement of the impedance spectra and cyclic voltammetry. A new ultracapacitor model composed of an LRC circuit and a constant phase element was developed along with a parameter extraction procedure. The model was validated using experimental data and simulation.