Fire Power
Fire Power is a solid-state device that captures waste heat from wood burning stoves and campfires, and converts it into usable electricity for charging small electronics. It is designed for off-grid environments, disaster relief, and remote communities. The system is compact, low-cost, and built for rugged conditions. In partnership with Engineers Without Borders, we tailored the design for real world use in areas lacking a reliable power grid, focusing on heat sources already in use for heating the home or cooking food. By utilizing waste heat from everyday sources, Fire Power provides a tangible solution for areas with insufficient power grids to help real people that Engineers Without Borders strives to support.
I designed and built the full electrical system, including the load regulation circuitry, user interface for charging devices, and implementing Peltier cooling modules for generation. I also ran thermal simulations to understand how heat would move through the system in different physical environments. One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to passively cool the device without any moving parts. After months of research and testing, I developed a solution that used the surrounding dirt as a natural heat sink, which was fully integrated into the final design. When I built and tested the prototype, it performed almost exactly as predicted, with a temperature difference within 5°C of my simulation. This project taught me that while modeling is useful, sometimes the best way to move forward is to just build it and let the physics dictate the results rather than code.
