A MassChallenge finalist is developing mobile refrigeration units that run on sun and water and are capable of saving the nearly one-half of developing-world produce that spoils before it ever reaches the consumer.
Evaptainers was the brainchild of Quang Truong, who was taking a class at MIT called "Development Ventures" last year, when his professor posed a challenge to the class: Think of a major problem in the developing world, and then come up with a solution.
"I've been to many developing countries over the years, and the one thing I've always noticed was how much produce spoiled," said Truong, a 27-year-old graduate of the Tufts Fletcher School, where he studied agriculture. "It's a huge problem a lot of agencies and governments are trying to deal with."
In his travels, he also had come across a "cool" invention, developed by a Nigerian, called the Pot-in-Pot Preservation Cooling System, essentially a small earthenware pot within a larger one, separated by a layer of wet sand.
The inner pot is filled with produce and covered with a wet cloth. And as the water in the sand and cloth evaporates, the temperature of the inner pot drops by as much as 40 degrees.
For farmers trying to get their produce to market, however, it had one important drawback, Truong said: The pots break easily, making them impractical to transport.
"I thought, hey, there's this really simple invention," he said. "Can I just make it mobile?"
Truong teamed up with a friend, Spencer Taylor, and founded Evaptainers, combining the time-tested evaporative cooling technique of the pot-in-pot system with modern design and materials.
In place of earthenware pots, Evaptainers are made of a breathable crate with wheels on one end and a storage container nestled inside. Between the crate and the container is an evaporative medium such as jute, sawdust or ceramic beads, supplied with water from a tank in the lid. When water evaporates from the medium into ambient air, latent heat is carried by evaporation into the surrounding environment, reducing the temperature inside the container to keep the produce cold.
Currently, Truong and Taylor are building their initial field test unit, which they hope to use in a three-month pilot in Morocco either late this year or early next year. If the pilot is successful, the two would sell Evaptainers for $80 to $120 to agricultural cooperatives there, allowing farmers to nearly double the amount of produce they could sell, with no more work, said Taylor, 32.
In the future, the co-founders said, Evaptainers also could be sold in the U.S. for use in farmers markets, farm shares and campsites.
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