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4/10/2009

Undergrad helped build Rice's first Capteur Soleil prototype

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

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.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Team member Claire Krebs, a senior mechanical engineering major from Hanszen College, helped build Rice's first Capteur Soleil prototype last month at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

"Where we were, there was no way to get online and find out more about it, so I learned what I could from them, and that was it," said Krebs. The concept piqued her interest; Capteur Soleil uses simple technology to harness the sun's energy for cooking and other tasks. So she made a mental note to follow up when she returned to Rice.

Krebs, a senior mechanical engineering major from Hanszen College, later learned the Capteur Soleil team had seed funding from Rice's Shell Center for Sustainability and was looking for a student worker. The job -- building prototypes and doing research -- appealed to her on multiple levels.

"I love to learn how to build things, but the research aspect was intellectually challenging," Krebs said. "I'd been working in El Salvador with Engineers Without Borders, but I hadn’t really worked on the research side of sustainable development. The idea of trying to solve a problem rather than someone's specific problem was interesting."

Krebs, who'd volunteered with Engineers Without Borders since she was a freshman, had some initial doubts about Capteur Soleil.

"You run a risk with research projects that aren't geared toward a specific community, because if you don't consider the social aspects of a problem, you can fail," Krebs said. "It became very clear to me that Doug and his team were asking the right questions, that they understood just how difficult it would be to solve this problem."

Krebs, who's applied for a research internship at NASA for the summer, said working on Capteur Soleil has been one of the highlights of her undergraduate experience.

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Rice testing low-tech solar device in rural Haiti

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.