A Simple and Efficient Solar Honeycomb Melter for Tanzanian Entrepreneurs

The capstone project of my degree was a collaboration with Project TEMBO: Tanzania Education and Micro Business Opportunity. This registered Canadian Charity works with community-based partners in Tanzania to provide fair and equitable access to education and business opportunities to individuals, especially young women who often face many barriers to acquire these kinds of opportunities. Our projects aimed to either directly provide opportunities or to help reduce the time allotted to necessary activities, like gathering water, so that individuals can enjoy opportunities when they become available.

Before developing solutions, we needed to understand the users we were designing for. This project was specifically focusing on a Maasai community in the Longido District of Arusha, Tanzania. This project would eventually take us to Tanzania to see the communities first-hand, but prior to this our group started with secondary research to learn more about the socioeconomics and the culture of the country.

After gaining a better understanding of what challenges our users were facing, I started to work on potential design opportunities. I chose to work in the entrepreneurship stream and started exploring less common agricultural activities, which is when I started to explore working with bees.

After looking at the work behind keeping bees in Tanzania, I noted that a lot of money and effort went into processing the honeycombs. There were limited options for honey extraction tools, and the prevailing options were expensive and mechanically complex. I wanted to explore another way of achieving the same result, but simplified and less expensive.

I found that melting a honeycomb in its entirety would completely separate the honey and beeswax. due to their difference in density, the wax would float to the top of the honey and cool as a solid piece. Considering how abundant solar power is in Tanzania, I started to envision a solar wax melter.

With concepts in mind our group traveled to Tanzania to stay in Longido, where we would be able to see our users, their community, and their daily routines first-hand. On this trip we saw many aspects of the Maasai way of life that we could not have seen through the internet, which helped inform our designs. We also visited Arusha to see the local manufacturing capabilities we could leverage to have our projects made within the country. At the conclusion of the trip we presented our concepts to key community members in Longido and received feedback to consider when choosing our design direction.

With a better understanding of the user and the available resources in Tanzania, I started to refine my initial melter idea. I had based my first designs off of a solar oven made of wood I had seen in Tanzania which used reflective interior materials and a mirrored solar reflector to capture the heat of the sun. However, I found that wood was a scarce resource due to the lack of water in the country, and refining parts could rapidly increase cost. Metal fabrication however was a common practice.

In my later designs, I proposed using repurposed oil drums to reduce the amount of new parts required to be fabricated and focused on metal fabrication and sourced components.

The following is my completed design at the time of the final submission. This semester was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused all fabrication labs in the university to be shut down. As a result, this design was mainly presented via renderings.

There were improvements I wanted to make to the design following graduation. These include a fully fabricated design more appropriate for commercial product and a new design configuration for indirect heat to prevent risk of discoloration. I'm in the process of visualizing these changes, so stay tuned!