Solar thermal devices with complex and beautiful designs like this one are cooking food, drying coffee and generating electricity in developing countries. To avoid the cost of large parabolic mirrors, Lorin Symington carefully arrays a mosaic of ordinary, flat mirrors. His design angles each mirror to reflect sunlight onto a hot plate for cooking, or onto a water tank for steam power generation.

+ Lorin Symington

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Post tags: "solar energy", ASTRA, haiti, Lorin Symington, mali, solar array, solar cooker, solar fire, Solar Power, solar technology

Swedish company Solvatten recently began distributing its user-friendly solar water sterilization jug in countries like drought-afflicted Somalia. The device disinfects up to 10 liters of water in two or more hours, depending on conditions. To use it, you just fill the jug, open it like a book right down the middle and place it in the sun. Clear plastic panels expose microbes in the water to UV rays while the black plastic interior absorbs radiation to heat the water. You’ll know the water is ready to drink when you see a smiley face on the jug’s heat sensor. Since people often cook over wood fires in rural developing regions and this device cuts out the need to boil untreated water, it can also reduce deforestation, improve indoor air quality, and even save lives.

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Post tags: clean water, Design for Health, design for humanity, eco design, green design, green products, solar jug, solar water jug, solar water purifier, Solar Water Sterilization Jug, Solvatten, sustainable design

A new design for a hydroelectric generator could cheaply light up off-grid areas. The Hydro-Electric Barrel is a spinning water wheel that floats on the water surface and turns in the current. The spinning motion drives permanent magnet generators inside. It could generate enough power to light banks of LEDs and light up bridges, buoys, or even charge mobile devices in off-grid areas and developing countries. And, because it sits on the surface, it doesn’t disrupt the environment as much as other hydro-power technologies.

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Post tags: "clean energy", eco design, green design, green energy, Hydro-Electric Barrel, hydroelectric energy, hydroelectric generator, mike lowery, renewable energy, sustainable design, water energy

Some very enterprising high school students have recycled scrapped sign posts, go-cart frames, fencing, and other parts into working vertical-axis wind turbines. The students are seniors in a green engineering course at Cape May Technical High School in New Jersey, and they raided their school’s maintenance scrap heap and hit up local businesses for parts that they could cut up and weld. The resulting turbines are capable of generating as much as 500W by harvesting the coastal town’s 20-knot winds.

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A new bicycle-powered latrine pump could redefine low-cost sanitation in developing countries. The pump makes work easier for latrine shovelers, who empty a latrine’s sewage pit when it’s full. The pump’s inventor, Nate Sharpe, is part of a team of MIT engineering and business school students who formed Sanergy, a group that’s working to improve latrine designs and convert human waste into usable energy.

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Post tags: bicycle-powered latrine pump, eco design, green design, human waste cleanup, maize sheller, MIT, nate sharpe, sanergy, sustainable design

This innovative new cookstove attachment solves two problems for off-grid homes: It turns the stove into a power generator and it improves kitchen air quality at the same. The attachment is a thermoacoustic generator based on a technology that NASA has tested for propelling space probes, but built with cheap parts, including an off-the-shelf loudspeaker. The makeshift attachment uses waste heat from the stove to make a soundwave inside a resonator, which it then runs through a loudspeaker working in reverse to convert the sound into electricity. It’s a prototype now, but the goal is to make a model that generates 10W and costs about $25. The stove is designed to work with most biomass-burning cookstoves, and part of the electricity that it generates powers an internal fan that blows smoke back over the flames to consume most of the pollutants.

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Post tags: eco stove, green design, green stove, loudspeaker stove, soundwave stove, stove attachment, thermoacoustic stove