<23 May> - The day was spent in arranging materials for the fabrication of the chula and a visit to Ahmedabad to attend an interaction with Dr. K C Malhotra.
<24 May> - The chulha fabricated on 23 May was done using 'Maeda' Soil as base and husk as binder. But due to poor quality of the soil, the chulha was fragile and broke easily.
So we departed from Grambharthi in serach of Kaap soils as it was presumed to be better than Maeda. A new chula was fabricated using hust again as the binder. The result was a good robust chulha.
The following points were noted while making the chulha:
1. Cow dung (donkey dung or camel dung is even better since cow dung has more acid content that reduces the strength of the chulha) forms a better substitute than husk.
2. Ash is sprinkled before making the chulha on the base to make it easier for it to separate from the base.
3. The chula was of 5kg.
The rest of the day was spent making presentation of the field visit observations and the problem statement definition. The problem definition was changed to 'An efficient and ergonomic Chula' as having a multi-source chula was only one way to deal with the problem of scarce fuel. Another was to make it more efficient which we think is the main need as areas of scarce natural resource like wood usually lack other sources too. So an efficient chula is required more than a multi-source chula.
<25 May> - The entireity of the day was spent making a presentation with the evening being occupied for a Mind Map session of the problem definition and the night for the presentations to Prof. Anil
A brief discussion with Prof. Anil was done and he suggested another fieldd visit as the data collected was very biased because the problems of the people near Grambharti were very different and did not align with our problem statement since they had abundance of fuel.
So a trip to Surendranagar was planned as it is a place where fuel wood is relatively less available than any other place near Ahmedabad.
<26 May> - The day was spent making a report in the morning and the afternoon was spent designing experiments for determining the efficiency of different types of chula, to get to know the factors that affect the efficiency, eg- unburnt fuel, fuel compartment size, and how does the type of fuel (wood) affect the operation of the chula.