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4/8/2009

Rice team to test low-tech solar device in rural Haiti
Fossil fuel alternative captures sun's heat for cooking, other uses

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

	JEFF FITLOW
	Capteur Soleil inventor Jean Boubour, left, and Rice’s Doug Schuler are commercializing a low-tech solar technology that harvests the sun’s heat for cooking and other tasks.

Sunlight is free but expensive to convert into electricity, so a Rice University-led team is opting for a low-tech approach in its quest to harvest solar energy in undeveloped communities.

"We want to alleviate energy problems in some of the poorest regions of the world, so we're using low-cost technology to capture the sun's heat for cooking and other uses," said team leader Doug Schuler, associate professor of management in Rice's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management. Schuler is the principal investigator on a seed grant from Rice's Shell Center for Sustainability that aims to commercialize a technology called "Capteur Soleil," which is French for solar capture.

Capteur Soleil is the brainchild of French inventor Jean Boubour, Schuler's co-investigator on the grant. Boubour invented the device almost 30 years ago after searching in vain for a simple solar technology that would be inexpensive enough for rural Africa.

"Our idea was to find something low-tech, without a motor for tracking the sun," Boubour said. "It's designed for a remote place without any electricity."

Capteur Soleil looks something like an ultramodern lawn swing. It's spine is a steel A-frame, and a bed of curved mirrors is slung beneath. The mirrors, which are actually polished aluminum panels, focus sunlight onto a steel pipe at the apex of the frame. Water running through the pipe is converted into steam, which can be used for cooking and other tasks like making soap or sterilizing medical instruments.

CAPTEUR SOLEIL

Schuler and Boubour say cooking is the simplest application, and it's the first they plan to test. While the Capteur Soleil can't provide enough heat to boil oil for frying, the steam can be used to cook dozens of dishes. At his home in Brest, France, Boubour has used a Capteur Soleil to cook rice, potatoes, beans, vegetables and meat dishes for years. The food is prepared in a double-boiler-style cooking system that's mounted on the Capteur Soleil frame.

The Shell Center seed grant will allow Schuler's team to build four prototypes for testing in developing nations. They hope to show that the systems can easily pay for themselves by offsetting the cost of propane, which is currently used and is expensive in remote, rural communities.

The first Capteur Soleil prototype, which was built at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen in March, is on its way for testing at St. Barthelemy School in Terrier Rouge, Haiti. The 450-student elementary school, which hosted undergraduate interns from Rice's Beyond Traditional Borders program last summer, recently lost its cafeteria sponsor. That's added several thousand dollars' worth of food and propane expenses to an already tight budget. Schuler said he hopes the Capteur Soleil can save St. Barthelemy's several thousand dollars per year in fuel costs.

	The first Capteur Soleil prototype, which was built at Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen in March, is on its way for testing at St. Barthelemy School in Terrier Rouge, Haiti.

"The operating cost for our system is essentially zero," Schuler said. It won't work on a cloudy day, so it won't eliminate fuel costs altogether, but we'll be collecting data to find out just how much it can save."

Boubour and undergraduate team member Claire Krebs, a Hanszen College senior majoring in mechanical engineering, built the first prototype in about two weeks. Schuler said Krebs and Boubour plan to build a second prototype this summer that will be tested in Nicaragua this fall. The third prototype will stay at the design kitchen for testing by students in Rebecca Richards-Kortum's bioengineering design course next fall.

"We're interested in seeing how we might use the Capteur Soleil to sterilize medical instruments in rural clinics and hospitals," said Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of Rice 360˚, Rice's global health program.

Schuler said he's grateful to Richards-Kortum; Maria Oden, director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen; and Joe Gesenhues, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science technician and shop manager, for their support in building the prototypes and incorporating them into Rice's ongoing global health and development efforts.

"We're still in the pilot phase of this project," Schuler said. "We hope to leverage the Shell Center funds to attract additional money and fully disseminate Capteur Soleil."

More information about the Capteur Soleil project is available at: http://tinyurl.com/crsolp.

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Undergrad helped build Rice's first Capteur Soleil prototype

Rice undergraduate Claire Krebs was 1,600 miles and a world away from Houston when she first heard about Rice's Capteur Soleil project. Krebs was conducting an engineering assessment in January for a water-quality project in rural Haiti when two of the people on the trip told her about Rice's low-tech solar energy technology.