The ever-industrious engineering students at Rice have made another promising device with medical applications. They’ve modified a solar power apparatus, tweaking it so that it can reach temperatures sufficient to sterilize surgical instruments. The technology could potentially bring effective sterilizing techniques to parts of the developing world that have traditionally lacked them.
The Rice students’ sun-powered autoclave is a modification, essentially, on a much older device, the Capteur Soleil, invented by the Frenchman Jean Boubour. The Capteur Soleil looks something like a metallic swingset, with curved panels to capture solar power. The Rice students then added a specially insulated box containing the autoclave.
Here’s how the system works. The sunlight’s energy is channeled and used to generate steam. A less inventive design might have simply sent that steam right into the autoclave to sterilize instruments. Instead, the team decided to use the steam to heat a conductive hotplate. The circular hotplate was designed in such a manner as to equally distribute the hot steam as it enters. A YouTube video explaining the project shows the hotplate (it’s around the 0:50 mark), which looks something like crop circles, or a circular labyrinth. As the steam gets ferried through the loops in the labyrinth, it gives “a nice, even heat transfer to the bottom of the autoclave,” says William Dunk, one of the students behind the project, in the video.
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