The Appropriate Technology Collaborative

Michigan State Edison Prize Team – 2009

Our Michigan State University student design team recently returned from Guatemala where they demonstrated the ATC/MSU design of a solar vaccine refrigerator. (The MSU students deserve all the credit here)

This remarkable invention works. Period.  Put it in the sun and it will keep vaccines very cold.  With minor modifications it will freeze water solid and keep it that way, even in hot climates, just as long as the sun shines.  If the sun doesn’t shine when you want to keep vaccines cold you can make a small wood fire to power the freezer.  Moreover it can be built for about $400.00, about a third the cost of what NGOs are spending now in remote regions of Africa.

Background:

Over half of all vaccines spoil due to temperature before they reach the people who so desperately need them in rural Africa and parts of Asia.  We met up with a representative of the World Health Organization to discuss this problem after which we, ATC, came up with a design problem:  To design a low cost refrigerator that can keep vaccines cold without the use of fossil fuels or electricity in rural parts of Africa.  Moreover the design should operate without human intervention, it should be robust and it must be cheap.  While this sounds impossible, we challenged a group of Michigan State University Engineering Students to design just such a refrigerator.  The students were more than up to the challenge, they reveled in the near impossibility of it.  Imagine being charged with the task “just make a box that freezes when you put it in the sun” because this is the essence of what we asked them to do.

From the MSU Student Presentation:

Many of the vaccines used to control diseases require cold temperatures for preservation. Without a reliable power infrastructure, developing countries often lack the resources to keep these vaccines cool for an extended time period, hampering the ability to adequately protect citizens. It is estimated that 50 percent of vaccines in rural areas are wasted due to spoilage.

The Appropriate Technology Collaborative Student Design Team – Michigan State,  was charged with the task of developing a refrigerator to solve this problem. Design specifications called for an adsorption refrigerator capable of maintaining a temperature between 2°C and 8°C that utilizes passive solar energy and can be built in developing countries. As the third team of a three-semester project, the students were given the tasks to create a design that was easily and affordably constructed and to build two prototypes.

During a 13-day trip to Guatemala, the team built the refrigerator (actual build time was less than one week!)  with locally-available materials and tested it in a real-world scenario. The team’s final product is a clear and comprehensive set of instructions for building the device distributed freely online.

…The Appropriate Technology Design Collaborative Student Design Team – Michigan State University

MSU Solar Refrigerator CAD Model

A special shout out to AIDG, The Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group who hosted our work in Guatemala, and to the intrepid Prof. Craig Somerton, without whom this project wouldn’t have been possible.

A copy of the design drawings for the Solar Refrigerator is available:  Solar Vaccine Refrigerator

Photo: Kevin McPhail, Muhammed Aslam, Eric Tingwall, Brent Rowland, Ryan McPhee