ETH zurich designs peakBoil, a 3D-printed camping stove

camping lovers give up all the luxuries of the city for a simple dinner with close friends in natural surroundings. sounds like a dream night until you have to cook your meal on an average gas camping stove — although, students and doctoral candidate of ETH Zurich are going to deal with it no more! partnered with the zurich university of the arts (ZHdK), the ETH zurich design and technology lab has created ‘peakBoil’, a 3D-printed shape reminiscent bundt cake tin, which hides the gas burner inside shielding it from the wind.

visualisation bt ETH zurich / patrick beutler

peakboil’s special design is accompanied by a very precise manufacturing —  the kettle is built from stainless still layer by layer, using laser melting. as explained on ETH Zurich’s website, then a pattern is created from metal melted by a computer-controlled laser beam.’in this way, complex objects are built up from the base in layers each just one-thirtieth of a millimeter thick,’ continues the website.

photo by ETH zurich / julian ferchow

‘this technique gives us a huge amount of design freedom, which you just don’t get with conventional manufacturing techniques; with metal casting, for instance, we could never achieve channels that are as thin as the ones inside our gas burner,’ explains julian ferchow, the project leader and a doctoral student in ETH Professor mirko meboldt’s group. ‘selective laser melting was originally developed as a fast way to manufacture prototypes. nowadays, this rapid prototyping technique is so mature that it can also be used for large-scale manufacturing.

video by pdz zurich