Summertime is camping time – a perfect opportunity to give up our everyday luxuries for a while and instead cook a simple dinner on a gas camping stove. If only the gusts of wind would go away instead of constantly blowing out the flame on the stove.

Now an ETH doctoral candidate and students from the ETH Zurich Design and Technology Lab and from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) have developed a novel stove that can cope even in strong winds: a kettle shaped like a Bundt cake tin encloses a gas burner, protecting it from the wind.

Practical tests on the mountaintop

Meanwhile, other design features make the kettle extremely energy efficient: the wall of the gas burner is rippled, like a citrus juicer. “This increases the contact area between the flame and the jug,” explains Julian Ferchow, the project leader and a doctoral student in ETH Professor Mirko Meboldt’s group. “That,” ETH student Patrick Beutler, who wrote his Bachelor’s thesis on the project, adds, “plus the fact that the wall is very thin, makes heat transfer to the contents of the jug ideal.”