Purdue News
Purdue News
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February 23, 2001 Purdue students to spend break
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"I'm really excited to be taking fellow students back to my country for this project," says Henry Quesada, a graduate student in wood processing and industrial engineering. The other students traveling to Costa Rica are undergraduates Isaac Slaven of Winamac, Ind., and Ryan Bradford of Greenwood, Ind.
Traveling with the students will be Rado Gazo, assistant professor in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources; Eva Haviarova, manager of Purdue's wood research laboratory; and Bob Leavitt, a Lafayette, Ind., woodworker and retired shop teacher. Gazo and Quesada will leave March 2 for the 14-day trip and the rest of the group will follow March 8.
The project stems from Haviarova's doctoral thesis in which she came up with a plan to create sturdy classroom furniture for developing countries using some of the cheapest materials available. Working with wood science Professor Carl Eckelman, she traveled to Costa Rica last year and built the prototypes for the desks and chairs. "We came up with a way to build the furniture using standardized parts made with simple techniques and scrap wood," Eckelman says.
Eckelman says furnishing schools in developing countries is difficult because the humid weather conditions cause desks and chairs to fall apart quickly – typically in one or two years.
Their furniture design takes advantage of the humidity. After the desks and chairs are assembled, moisture causes the joints to swell, creating a strong, tight fit. The pieces fit together with round mortises and tenons, made using a deep hole saw attached to an electric motor.
In order to determine the furniture's durability, Haviarova brought her prototypes back to Purdue for testing in the "torture chamber."
"We strap them to a machine that stresses the pieces and tests how they hold up under constant use," she says. They also have used high-tech methods for gauging the furniture strength, using a computer to complete structural analysis of the products.
On this trip Quesada will look at the feasiblity of turning the furniture making effort into a small business enterprise. If it's doable, small companies could be set up to make the desks and chairs on a money-making basis, he says.
The research team will look at the shop layout, production process, material flow and other factors to make the system for building desks and chairs easy and efficient. Because the students have varying degrees of skill at woodworking, they also will guage the time and abilitity required to make the furniture.
For this project, the wood is being donated by the Tropical American Tree Farm in Costa Rica. Eckelman says the furniture design utilizes thinner pieces of wood that can come from smaller trees that are less desirable for making wood products.
The furniture has already been used to outfit classrooms at a school in Jamaica.
"Costa Rica has decided that their future lies in their children," says Haviarova. "They have experienced a big deficit in furnishing their school classrooms, and we hope to help them find a workable and inexpensive means of solving their problem."
Sources: Rado Gazo, (765) 494-3634; radogazo@fnr.purdue.edu
Eva Haviarova, (765) 494-3619; ehaviar@fnr.purdue.edu
Writer: Beth Forbes, (765) 494-2722; bforbes@aes.purdue.edu
Other sources: Carl Eckelman, (765) 494-3640
PHOTO CAPTION:
Henry Quesada, a Purdue graduate student in wood processing and industrial engineering, tests the durability of a chair on a device called the "torture chamber." He and two other students are spending spring break helping to construct 50 desks and chairs for two school classrooms in Costa Rica. (Purdue Agricultural Communications Service photo by Tom Campbell)
A publication-quality photograph is available at the News Service Web site and at the ftp site. Photo ID: Gazo.costarica
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