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(drums)

Wole Soboyejo:
So the idea of the solar refrigerator came from a

Wole Soboyejo:
discussion I had with a group at the Mpala clinic,

Wole Soboyejo:
which is a community-based clinic in Kenya that focuses on

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doing community medicine vaccinations for people in

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Laikipia District -- a place where there really isn't much.

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And if you could put this into context, it's a place that's

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about the size of Wales, where kids would not get vaccinated

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unless they had these camels that take vaccines to very remote

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places that you couldn't access by Land Rover.

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The clinic is one of hope.

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It's a clinic that provides services to about 312,000

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people. In the absence of that clinic,

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the kids would not be vaccinated, and basically access

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to community-based medicine would be absent.

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Right now, there are daily vaccine losses during the missions.

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So once they open up the

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vaccines they have an ice pack and they lose the rest of the

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materials unless they are able to maintain the temperatures.

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So consequently we're talking about a poor country with

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limited resources where there are these daily losses of vaccines

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in the absence of solar-powered cooling.

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So, my design goals were fairly simple.

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So these are seven-day missions in which the community medical

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people go out first on Land Rover and then on camels with

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these camel groups.

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And I wanted to have a system where the energy that you could store

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in the batteries and the energy that you could replenish

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through daily exposure to the sun would guarantee that the

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refrigerators would always have power.

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When we started the project, we thought about various concepts.

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Ultimately, we came up with a very simple idea of just an

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inclined structure that allows you to orient the solar panels

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with respect to the sun and hence optimize the solar

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collection. Now we are in the process of

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making that in bamboo, which we think will be the

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optimum in terms of weight, aesthetics and the ability of

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the local people to maintain this.

Wole Soboyejo:
A key component of this though was testing them out at the

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Bronx Zoo. Working with camels actually

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presents interesting challenges.

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There was a story I heard of -- the head of the group at the

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Bronx Zoo, I guess, one day upset one of the camels and the

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camel decided to pick him up by his head.

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So this kind of thing means you have got to be careful.

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You have got to recognize that these animals have real feelings.

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And you have to design systems that integrate with them.

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You know the camel has got a funny shape.

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It's got a torso. You have to figure how to fit around that.

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It's got a hump. And although we thought we had

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measured the hump, we found out that different camels have

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different hump sizes. You have to integrate along

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different torsos. And so the real ingenuity

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actually happened once we put the design concept into contact

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with the camels at the Bronx Zoo. So our goal, really,

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beyond the implementation in one model for Mpala, would really

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be to diffuse these across, not just based on aid but with an

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approach that empowers the local people, in Africa,

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in the Middle East, in places where people are not

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necessarily able to afford health care to use the

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production of these as a way of sustaining the livelihood of

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people in those communities.

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You know, I think our role in universities such as Princeton

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is to embrace the grand challenges of our time.

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We, I think, should be leaders in this rather than just

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following the whims of projects that don't make an impact in the world.

(music)