Three schoolchildren have developed a refrigerator that runs on salt

Three teenage schoolchildren from India have created a refrigerator that runs on salt. It will be a good option for delivering vaccines and medicines to rural areas.

The inventors were Dhruv Chaudhary, Mitran Ladhania and Mridul Jain from Indore, who won the Earth Prize worth $12,500. Their refrigerator does not require electricity but uses salts that extract heat from the environment when dissolved in water.

The schoolchildren came up with the salt cooling method after hearing how difficult it is to deliver the COVID-19 vaccine to rural areas without electricity. The refrigerator is called Thermavault and is designed to transport vaccines, medicines and medical supplies, and organs for transplant.

Of course, not all salts are used in the refrigerator. Only a few of them have a cooling effect when dissolved in water, as charged atoms or ions disintegrate. The students found a list of 150 salts online that might work, then narrowed it down to 20 salts.

Unfortunately, none of these salts cooled the water while working in a lab at the Indian Institute of Technology. But the students didn’t stop and found that ammonium chloride maintains a temperature of 2 to 6 degrees Celsius, which is ideal for vaccines. By adding barium hydroxide octahydrate to the mixture, they were able to achieve temperatures below zero. The students then created a prototype refrigerator and began testing it in local hospitals.

The Thermavault refrigerator is an insulated plastic container with a copper inner wall that holds medications or organs. The cooling solution, which is poured by dissolving salts in water, is poured into the space between the walls.

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To be continued…