Solar vaccine refrigerator - Team 2020 - 03

Summary of our design

We developed a smart vaccine refrigeration and storage system, which harnesses the power of the sun to create ice banks that help keep vaccines at an optimum temperature throughout the night as well as cloudy days when irradiance levels are low. We achieved this by using solar direct drive technology, which means that batteries are not needed. The refrigerator’s two-chamber design separates the ice layer and the vaccines in the refrigerator. This can help provide more storage, enhance temperature control, and provide improved thermal insulation. Individual access also helps to maintain low temperatures and prevent gases from escaping the vaccine chamber. Solar direct drive technology helps to reduce the emissions and overall carbon footprint of our product throughout its lifecycle. Products such as our solar direct drive vaccine refrigerator can help enhance the availability of vaccines in remote and off-grid locations, which can improve health outcomes for vulnerable communities in developing countries.

Our experience designing andbuilding the prototype

Prototyping the Solar Direct Drive Vaccine Refrigerator has been a great learning experience for our entire team. It gave us a lot of valuable lessons and helped us identify a lot of the design flaws at a very early stage and effectively troubleshoot errors in real time. The Efficiency for Access Design Challenge team’s continued support has made the prototyping experience a lot more insightful and effective by allowing us to not only discuss our ideas with industry experts, but also provide us with adequate funding to bring our project to life. The immersive webinars and the abundance of resource materials in Efficiency for Access’ archives also helped us in our prototyping journey.

Our design works to address the following SDGs

-SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being): Our refrigerator can help improve health and well-being for people in off-grid areas by enhancing the storage and availability of vaccines. -SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy): Using energy as our main source of power in the place of batteries can help reduce the cost of the appliance and environmental impact. This is partly because batteries are very difficult to dispose of. -SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): Our project has the potential to enhance the availability of vaccines in rural off-grid areas, which can help people maintain business productivity. We believe that this can help increase morale and, in turn, boost the overall economic output of the region.