British rocket scientist says he's designed a better saucepan

http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-saucepan-rocket-scientist-heat-efficient-20140710-story.html

by rk0567 • 12 years ago

95 80 12 years ago

personZ2• 12 years ago

Much greater surface area, so that part makes sense at least for flame-based cooking. I doubt it offers any benefit for non-flame-based cooking (elements, ceramic, etc. It might actually be a detriment because it would dissipate more energy. It goes both ways).

It looks like the inside of the pan has the same fins, which makes sense otherwise they'd have uneven thicknesses. That would be a serious cleaning issue.

ZoF• 12 years ago

It looks like the inside of the pan has the same fins, which makes sense otherwise they'd have uneven thicknesses. That would be a serious cleaning issue.

Doesn't look like that at all to me; in fact I think if the inside was finned it would be an immediate no-go for most, for the very reason you've stated.

personZ2• 12 years ago

Given that the company goes to enormous lengths to never show or talk about the inside of the pan, I have to assume this is the Achilles heal. If the fins aren't replicated on the inside, then some areas will be mm from the flame, other areas cms (which, as an aside, means an enormous amount of material per pan) -- aluminum is a decent heat conductor, but that would still be a very bad recipe for cookware.

Crito2• 12 years ago

"It looks like the inside of the pan has the same fins, which makes sense otherwise they'd have uneven thicknesses. That would be a serious cleaning issue."

It would also make it nearly impossible to cook anything that needed to be stirred to prevent burning. Stirring a regular pot with a rubber spatula is pretty easy, but getting into all of those nooks? That looks like a royal pain.

It's probably alright for things that won't burn though, like soups.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

...things that won't burn though, like soups.

If you can't burn soup you're not trying hard enough! b^)

beemoe2• 12 years ago

"non-flame-based-cooking"

So, methods that don't rely on the convection of air to the pan. I would guess an induction cook top would be a better example than a ceramic element.

At a quick glance, if these efficiency percentages being thrown around are actually comparable(maybe not), than induction still beats fancy convection pots even with heatsink bottoms like these: http://www.appliancemagazine.com/editorial.php?article=2257&...

It looks like the inside of the pan has the same fins

I couldn't find out if it does. I found others, like the pots in the link above that have a flat inside.

My guess is that using a pressure cooker with an induction cooktop fed by on-site solar would be the most efficiency possible, but I have not done the math and would love to be corrected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_cooking#Efficiency_a...

jonah2• 12 years ago

solar panel > induction cooktop > pressure cooker

or just skip the intermediary steps and conversion losses and use a Solar Cooker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker

NLips• 12 years ago

It does mean they're covering maybe 60-70% of the UK's market (where this pan is sold) - gas use is very prevalent in the UK due to historically having being cheaper than electricity.

I don't see where it looks like there are fins on the inside, and I disagree with your insistence below that it must for heat-transfer reasons - the fins are (relatively) thin, so I'd estimate no point on the inside of the circumference would be several centimetres from the [hot air]. Besides, part of the point of the fins is that they capture heat from the air. Without any math required, if the fin is a reasonable conductor, this means the air is hotter than the fin, which is hotter than the inside of the pan. Where fins join the pan there's a large surface area capturing heat from the air going to a smaller area of pan, compared to gaps between fins where the area in contact with the air is approximately equal to the area of inside pan.

edit: [Disclosure] Dr Povey was one of my tutors, and the bearded fellow with glasses in the video was a peer at college (six engineers in my year).

rquantz2• 12 years ago

The article doesn't mention how the saucepan performs at low heat, which is a pretty important part of cooking. Especially if you don't have a great stove, the low end of the heat range will often be too hot, and so you rely on having a good, heavy, low conductivity pan that will keep its contents from getting too hot.

Boiling water quickly is nice, but ruining your custard because it boils is very not nice.

Retric• 12 years ago

If you want steady low heat they make metal plates with holes in them for this purpose. I think there called diffusers?

rquantz2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty happy with the steady low heat I can get with a good conventional pan. But claims that this is the pan of the future will only hold up if it not only heats up very efficiently at high temperatures, but also doesn't heat up too efficiently at low temperatures.

colanderman3• 12 years ago

Yes, "flame tamer" and "heat diffuser" are two terms I've heard for such a thing.

dsirijus• 12 years ago

Am I mistaken or, at [1], it can be noticed that a lot of heat goes into handle?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lKvb...

KamiCrit• 12 years ago

Comfort is the trade off for efficient cooking.

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

Indeed, at t=98 it's really clear. I wonder if they tried the pan with no fins under the handle, or with a protrusion to prevent the rising gas heating the handle? Heating the handle to extremes, it seems as hot as the hottest parts, seems like a pretty serious deficiency for a design for domestic use.

I wonder what the beta testing (ie end-user testing) was like. These look like they'd burn your sauce?

pizza• 12 years ago

Great point. I wonder if a hot handle is at all avoidable when using a more efficient pan.

jonah2• 12 years ago

Or a non-thermally-conductive handle.

carlob2• 12 years ago

According to the video in the product pages [1] the creator of this pan came up with the idea on a mountaineering trip because "it takes forever to boil water at high altitude".

What?! Isn't it the other way around? Lower atmospheric pressure means that water boils at significantly lower temperature [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lK...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=boiling%20temperature%2...

kazinator• 12 years ago

Hi carlob; my thoughts exactly! The boiling point is lower. It takes longer to boil foods because of the lower temperature, but that's a different problem from time-to-boil, which should be shorter, if anything.

carlob2• 12 years ago

It does take longer to cook food by boiling it, but having a more efficient pan won't help for that. As a matter of fact it becomes almost impossible to make risotto at altitudes over 3000 m.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

I guess a lot of stoves don't work as well in the thinner, usually colder air.

(with all sorts of other things feeding into it, the fuel, the particular design of the stove, etc.)

Avshalom• 12 years ago

Not that strapping a heat exchanger to a pot is a new idea among the sort of people that would be on mountaineering trips

http://www.esbit.de/en/products/72/2-35l-pot-with-heat-excha...

http://www.cascadedesigns.com/msr/cookware/cookware-accessor...

http://www.jetboil.com/

http://www.cascadedesigns.com/msr/stoves/stove-systems/categ...

micro_cam4• 12 years ago

Actually owning a jetboil makes me want one of these pots. That thing just sips fuel.

Blahah• 12 years ago

At high altitude you boil water in a pressure cooker. That takes a long time - perhaps that's what he's referring to.

thisrod• 12 years ago

The problem is that it's cold up there, so the vapour pressure in a cartridge of liquified gas is much lower, and the flame in your stove is pretty marginal.

notok22• 12 years ago

I'm not sure this is what he meant, but I think he refers to the temperature of the water. If you lower the pressure, it takes a lesser temperature to get the water to start boiling.

So if you go on a mountain and put a pot with water over a fire, it will start evaporating rapidly(boiling) at a lesser temperature than 100 degrees Celsius, so he needs a more efficient way to transfer more heat into the water to get it to 100 degrees Celsius(normal boiling temperature).

ramchip• 12 years ago

Putting more heat into boiling water won't make hit hotter, it'll just evaporate quicker. You'd need a pressure cooker.

micro_cam4• 12 years ago

The boiling point of water is lower but there are a few other things going on:

Most water is snow or ice so you need to raise it from that point not room temperature.

Snow also has lots of air in which means it and is a really good insulator and floats so to get a pot of boiling water you need to sit there making snow balls and dropping them and waiting for them to melt then bring that water up to temperature.

All of your water for drinking, cooking and cleaning comes from snow since there often isn't any liquid water. You don't need to boil all of it unless it might be contaminated (like at a crowded camp) but it takes a lot of time just to melt a water bottles worth of snow.

The ambient temperature may be lower and there will be wind. You will loose a lot of heat to convection (wind blocks or cooking in a tent help).

The air is thinner and lots of stoves don't get the fuel/oxygen mix they need.

The boiling point of isobutane is 10F so if you are using fuel canisters and it is cold you'll need to work to warm the fuel up as well or you'll get much less power then normal (use a propane blend, keep one fuel canister in your pocket to warm it up, put it in a warm water bath while cooking, use a stove that has a preheat loop to warm cold fuel and can be used with an inverted canister).

Then once you get your water up to boil it takes longer to cook things because of the lower boiling point.

They say mountaineering is for people with selective memories that prevent them from recalling suffering ;)

geon2• 12 years ago

...But only for gas stoves. It would be interesting to see a map of the preferred stove technologies.

blahedo• 12 years ago

And by "preferred" you presumably mean "most used". I live in a town that, inexplicably, does not have access to natural gas lines. A lot of people here would "prefer" gas stoves but we're stuck with electric. :(

But yes, I'd love to see a map like that. Before I moved here I assumed that pretty much everywhere in the developed world had natural gas piping, but evidently not.

geon2• 12 years ago

Here in Sweden, I have never seen gas infrastructure. Possibly some o the really old, large cities have it in the "old town".

Some enthusiasts have gas stoves, but they would use propane flasks.

wavefunction• 12 years ago

Are you looking for... (puts on thick-rimmed eye-glasses) a heat map?

analog31• 12 years ago

When I lived in a suburb in Texas, there was no natural gas available in the neighborhood.

Now I live in a Northern city, and could probably generalize to a reasonable extent: Cities are plumbed for gas, and newer houses will have gas appliances. Many older houses -- even in neighborhoods with gas service -- were heated with oil, and most but not all have been upgraded. Quite a lot of people I know buy a house and discover that there's a gas furnace but everything else is electric.

For instance while living in one house, I extended the plumbing so I could install a gas clothes dryer. Folks tend to prefer gas stove. In my house, running gas to the kitchen would require quite a lot of drywall trauma, and I learned to cook on a gas stove, so it's not a big deal for me.

In rural areas, it's mostly propane.

The house I lived in during grad school had a coal chute.

micro_cam4• 12 years ago

There is a bit of an exodus going on from propane as its price has risen faster then other fuels but otherwise this is spot on.

showthrow• 12 years ago

"the super pan was developed by astronauts who quit the space program to devote their LIVES to developing PANS!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQAFv1sI6TU&feature=kp

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

Is channelling the hot combustion gases up the side more efficient than having a recessed or concave bottom (e.g. a flange that fits down around the circumference with insets to fit the grid on which the pan rests)?

gjvc• 12 years ago

"Already the new design has won the 2014 Hawley Award from the Worshipful Company of Engineers, a British professional group."

These people don't seem to care that nobody in their right mind buys aluminium cookware.

DanBC• 12 years ago

The links between aluminium cookware and Alzheimer's are weak at best.

Aluminium cookware has some advantages - especially for very large pans.

And if you're worried about aluminium using different pans is only removing a small amount from your lifestyle - it's used everywhere. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9119528/Is-aluminium-reall...

blauwbilgorgel• 12 years ago

The links between aluminium cookware and Alzheimer's are inconclusive. From your article:

It can migrate to food from cookware and packaging materials such as foil and cartons. One study found that around 20 per cent of aluminium in the diet came from the use of aluminium cookware and foil, according to the Food Standards Agency. Tomatoes, rhubarb, cabbage and many soft fruits should not be cooked in aluminium pans, it says.

Older studies into the relation between aluminium and Alzheimer's have shown that aluminium has neurotoxic effects. A direct link between aluminium exposure and contracting Alzheimer's was only found recently:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/272573.php

Overall, these results suggest very strongly that occupational exposure to aluminium contributed significantly to the untimely death of this individual with Alzheimer's disease.

Now inhaling aluminium dust through a dust mask is a lot different from cooking in aluminium pans, but I won't say the link is weak at best.

This remains very difficult to study, due to the long-term effects, and unfortunately also due to little funding and pushbacks from the aluminium industry itself.

zorpner• 12 years ago

For pretty much any pan that's not a saute, nearly every meal in every restaurant (at least all the ones I've worked in or been in the kitchen of) is cooked in aluminium. Go to your nearest restaurant supply store -- almost all of the saucepans and larger pots are spun Al.

awjr• 12 years ago

I'd like to see the benefit of each pan type analysed. If the fins are on the sides of the pan, then I can see there being little benefit on a frying pan.

I'm sort of disappointed this is patented and only available on a saucepan costing £60+. It's the type of invention that would specifically benefit poorer house holds.

As an 'evolution' of this, what would the impact of a cpu heat sink 'vortex' base have on the efficiency of a pan. Go crazy and have a double skinned pan (attached by many internal fins), then vent the hot air up through the gap between the pans via the 'vortex'.

Now I know cleaning this could be an issue...but I'm assuming you would capture quite a high amount of the heat from the burning gas.

beloch• 12 years ago

This kind of pot should cool down its contents significantly faster than a normal pot too. Whether that's an advantage or disadvantage probably depends on the application though.

marcosscriven• 12 years ago

Looking at this immediately made me think of my induction hob back home in London. I think they're popular in Asia, but not at all in UK.

I think in the UK people get them mixed up with other forms of electric hobs. I take great delight in placing a piece of paper on one of the rings, placing a pan of water on top, and turning it on full blast. Visitors are amazed when the water boils extremely quickly, and the paper is just slightly warmed.

So IMO induction is far more controllable, efficient, and faster than gas, not to mention so much easier to clean, and even a better pan for gas isn't going to change that.

nightcracker• 12 years ago

Induction is terrible for the environment though, as you're turning high efficiency energy (electricity) into low efficiency energy (heat).

CapitalistCartr• 12 years ago

I don't understand what high and low efficiency means in this context and how it applies to the environment. All electric stoves convert electricity to heat; do you mean to say that natural gas is the better environmental choice? Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.

joenathan• 12 years ago

What stove doesn't use heat to cook?

mikeash2• 12 years ago

How does the end-to-end efficiency of an electrical generating plant connected to an induction cooker compare to the combustion efficiency of a small, cheap gas burner and the thermal transfer efficiency of sticking a pot above the flame?

Some random googling shows total efficiency for gas is around 25-30%. Induction outperforms it by a comfortable margin, in that case, even ignoring the possibility that some of your electricity comes from renewables.

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

I'm a bit disappointed it solves one problem in isolation (heat transfer from gas to pan) and not much else.

Having said that, I wonder how it would combine with pot skirts and fireless cookers?

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/07/cooking-pot-insulatio...

sirgawain332• 12 years ago

This article is a great example of NIH syndrome.

You can get the same improvement with "About $5 of materials and an hour of time." [1]

That's by Dale Andreatta, a mechanical engineer that's been tinkering with improved stoves for decades. But he's not the only one, there are plenty of pot tweaks that achieve comparable or better the the improvements cites in the article.

Like many commenters below bring up, there are other design constraints to cooking technology than raw throughput -- performance at low temperature, manufacturing complexity, ease of cleaning, evenness of heating, performance under varying ambient conditions (humidity, wind, temp).

I encountered many such rocket scientists (literally) while designing improved stoves over the last few years. The engineering of stoves only superficially resembles the engineering of jet engines: the quantities are all different (low flow rate, low pressures, lower temperatures) and, as a result, the overall drivers of performance are very different (for example, stove to pot efficiency is largely governed by excess air control, NOT surface area)

A good example is that I got many recommendations to add "swirlers" [2] to stoves to improve mixing and reduce output CO. This works great in a jet, but it's useless in a stove: there's not enough pressure generated by natural draft to make the device effective.

[1] pg. 14 http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/ethos/files/ethos2008/Sat%20AM%2...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=swirlers+jet+engine&espv=2&t...

ertdfgcb4• 12 years ago

Personally, I'd much rather buy his version than make my own. The newer design has the fins going all the way up the pot, which seems like it would make it more efficient at heating the sides, although it might be inconsequential (I'm not a rocket scientist). The newer design is also much much nicer looking that the cobbled together one, and the single piece body seems more durable. I don't think this is an example of NIH syndrome, I think this an example of a commercial implementation of a good hack.

sirgawain332• 12 years ago

I could dig up examples of nicer looking finned pots. The name escapes me at the moment, but I remember seeing one at a conference last year.

The point is that the technique was well known. It's not manufacturing or aesthetics that's been holding back the technology.

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

Jet engines are not rocket engines, and scientists are not engineers.

Source: JP121 at Caltech

Tloewald• 12 years ago

I'm not convinced that even heat up the sides is actually what cooks want from a pot, certainly not always. I can't say I've ever thought, as I was cooking, what this pot needs is heat distributed up the sides. It also presimably makes the pots heavier, harder to clean, and hotter to handle.

colanderman3• 12 years ago

When cooking with a wok, you want MOST of the heat on the sides, to maximize the surface area you can cook with.

I'm not sure about other pots, but even heating around the contents of the pan is probably always better than the alternative.

venomsnake• 12 years ago

Good luck stirring in that.

prawn2• 12 years ago

I doubt there are fins inside. It would be almost useless for any application if there were. Surely not? Can't find any reviews online - just repeats of the announcements. Surely someone's bought one?

British rocket scientist says he's designed a better saucepan

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