Engineering solutions for kitchen challenges

Crafty engineering can help solve many problems, including those we face in our own kitchens. At EPFL's Institute of Mechanical Engineering, students from three laboratories tackled some of the most common kitchen challenges as part of the first Kitchen-Inspired Engineering contest. Cooking the perfect poached egg is a lot trickier than it looks. That's why it was selected as one of the challenges that students tackled in the first edition of the Kitchen-Inspired Engineering contest. "The idea behind this engineering challenge was to give Bachelor's students experience working on an entire project, from developing a design and running simulations to performing tests and building a prototype," says John Kolinski, head of EPFL's Engineering Mechanics of Soft Interfaces (EMSI) laboratory. "Each of the three teams participating in the contest decided which kitchen problem it wanted to solve and came up with its own ideas." The teams, which consisted of four to five students each, met once a week during the spring semester. They worked closely with their professors and postdoc researchers to develop functional designs that address the specific problem they selected.