Engineering students from the University of Dayton won three awards at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C., for creating a device that will soon operate without using electricity and provide eco-friendly refrigeration in areas that lack electricity. They created a prototype of a Solar Thermal Adsorption Refrigerator.
Solar Thermal Adsorption Refrigerator Prototype (Source: UDayton)
This team was supported by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) grant. The team won the American Society of Civil Engineering’s Sustainability Development Award, the Mid-Atlantic Solar Energy Society’s Sustainability Energy Award and architecture and consulting firm organicARCHITECT’s Vituvius.
According to the group’s advisor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering, Jun-Ki Choi “The group’s prototype model showed one successful replacement of a conventional fridge with this technology can achieve up to 22 tons of lifetime carbon dioxide emission reduction. That’s equal to emissions from three typical U.S. households in a year. Even a small percentage of the proposed technology being adopted can significantly reduce environmental impacts worldwide.”
