Wieldy Rations - Self-Heating Food Containers

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Wieldy Rations:
Self-Heating Food Containers

Student Work, April 2011

We were tasked to design packaging for food that was be eaten in the outdoors, and the catchword was "Convenient". So we looked at several ideas, but decided on adapting the excisting technology used in hand warmers for use in the food containers.

Wieldy Rations consists of two thermoses (one for liquids and one larger for soups and stews), reusable heating cartridges and a variety of freeze-dried food packages.

The cartridges are filled with a supersaturated solution of sodium acetate that precipitates when clicking a metal plate in the bottom of the cartridge thus forming a nucleation center which causes the solution to crystallize, releasing heat in the process. The cartridges can easily be reused hundreds of times, just by boiling them in water.

The advantage of Wieldy Rations is that you don't need to bring water for cooking, and that you don't even need to take off you gloves to make hot drinks or to melt snow. Just load the thermoses with cartridges and beverages before you depart and when you need to drink something hot you just pop off the bottom lid, click the metal plates in the bottom of the cartridges and wait a few minutes.

And when you make camp you can easily boil the cartridges and they are ready to use again the next morning.

We were three people in our group : Pontus Lindman, who did the logo, Emilia Orving, who made the packages for the freeze-dried food, and I, who modelled the thermoses in SolidWorks.

I didn't really know how to visualize the difference between Wieldy Rations and an ordinary thermos, because the heating cartridges are not visible from the outside. So I tried different exploded views and even to make the thermos of glass to make the compartment for the cartridge visible.

The first rendering of the food thermos, showing the inside,
made of polished aluminium as to make it easy to clean.

Some rather phallic views of the heating cartridge.

Here I put the thermoses in a brass mirror box to try to make a more varied view.
I also put everything in a sunset environment that plays well with the polished brass.

A more conventional setting where I put the cartridges in front of the thermoses,
trying to convey their location inside the thermoses.

Here I made the beverge thermos out of glass, so the possition of the the heating cartridge is visible.

A slight fisheye view and with the focus on the beverage thermos, blurring the nearest heating cartridge, trying to make some depth in the image.

Extreme fisheye fom above, trying to get a view of the inside of the thermos. I also lit up the inside bottom of the thermos to make the inside visible.