A French inventor’s design for a device using solar energy to provide heat for cooking in developing nations has been modified by a team of engineering students at America’s Rice University into a potentially lifesaving machine that can sterilise medical instruments.
Jean Boubour’s Capteur Soleil, or Sun Trap, could prove invaluable in parts of the world where power sources for modern sterilisation equipment are not available, but solar energy is abundant.
The Capteur Soleil works on solar thermal principles. A bed of curved, polished aluminium mirrors are slung beneath an A-frame, directing sunlight back onto a steel tube at the apex of the frame. Water inside the tube heats up rapidly, producing steam, which is then used to heat a modified stovetop. The Rice University team of senior engineering students successfully heated an autoclave to 121 degrees Celsius for the time required to pass FDA sterilisation requirements.
“We put about an inch of water inside, followed by the basket with the tools and syringes,” team member Sam Major said. “We’ve used some biological spores from a test kit, steamed them, and then incubated them for 24 hours and they came back negative for biological growth. That means we killed whatever was in there.”
Originally designed to create steam to cook food, Boubour invented the Capteur Soleil decades ago, but the machine attracted the interest of Rice University’s Doug Schuler in 2009, and a prototype model was built as a way to utilise solar energy to help the impoverished in rural Africa.
Schuler is the Rice team’s faculty advisor and says the potential applications for the device are practically endless.
“This is really the latest iteration of a much larger project. We already have a version of the Capteur Soleil being used in Haiti for cooking, but we felt it could do more.”
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