Oxford engineer Thomas Povey, who designs cooling systems for jet engines, was on a mountaineering trip, struggling to get a pot of water to boil at altitude, when the idea for the Flare pan came to him:
With a conventional pan, explains Povey, the flame from a stove rises up around the pan “and a lot of that heat is dissipated into the environment. With a Flare Pan, the fins capture a lot of heat that would otherwise be wasted.” According to Povey, the pans use about a third the gas and cooks roughly 30% faster than comparable, standard cookware. That means they’re cheaper and quicker to use than conventional pans, a fact that has garnered Povey’s pots a 2014 Hawley Award from the Worshipful Company of Engineers for “the most outstanding engineering innovation that delivers demonstrable benefit to the environment.”
I guess he doesn’t have to clean it. Waste more water and soap.
Several pans have an indented part in the bottom to retain a bit of heat.
There was a good article in Low-Tech Magazine on the same topic.
I wonder how the energy required to create a pan compares to the energy that will be expended on it over a lifetime of use. Some brief Googling turns up nothing.