A low-cost device that Rice University bioengineering students invented to help premature babies breathe more easily will be rolled out to teaching hospitals in three African nations, thanks to a $400,000 award from pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and London-based charity Save the Children. The technology, which is known as “bubble CPAP,” earned the top prize in GSK and Save the Children’s inaugural Healthcare Innovation Award program.
The prize was won by Friends of Sick Children in Malawi, the charitable arm of the pediatric department of Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. The hospital, the University of Malawi College of Medicine and Rice University’s Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies are already partnering to distribute bubble CPAPs to 27 hospitals throughout Malawi. The funding from the Healthcare Innovation Award, along with backing from the Ministry of Health in Malawi, will allow Friends of Sick Children in Malawi and its partners to share the life-saving technology with teaching hospitals in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa.
Neonatal nurse Florence Mwenifumbo monitors a newborn that is receiving bubble CPAP treatment at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.
“This remarkable project shows what can be achieved through grassroots innovation, and we are delighted to be able to recognize the hard work of all involved,” said GSK Country Manager Todd Mavende, who announced the award winners in London. “It is saving lives of Malawi’s children today and can make a difference for millions of children around the world tomorrow.”
The Rice-invented technology is a low-cost version of “continuous positive airway pressure,” or CPAP, a standard feature of most neonatal units in the developed world. CPAP helps babies that are in respiratory distress by keeping their lungs inflated so they may breathe more easily. Respiratory distress claims the lives of about 1 million African newborns each year.
With a price around $6,000, conventional CPAP machines are too expensive for hospitals in the developing world. In 2010, a team of senior students from Rice University in Houston, Texas, invented bubble CPAP as a low-cost alternative. The team members — Jocelyn Brown, Michael Pandya, Joseph Chang, Haruka Maruyama and Katie Schnelle — created the technology as part Rice 360°’s award-winning, hands-on engineering education programBeyond Traditional Borders (BTB).
In clinical trials at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, bubble CPAP was shown to increase the survival rate of newborns with respiratory distress by 27 percent. It is estimated that the technology could save the lives of 178,000 African children if implemented continentwide.
In Malawi, bubble CPAP has been renamed “Pumani,” which means “breathe easy” in Chichewa, one of the languages spoken in Malawi. Pumani costs about 15 times less than traditional CPAP, and Rice 360°, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, the University of Malawi College of Medicine and the Malawi Ministry of Health are working together to distribute Pumani to Malawi’s 27 government hospitals.
Pumani, an award-winning low-cost device that Rice University students invented to help premature babies in Malawi breathe more easily, will be rolled out to teaching hospitals in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa, thanks to a $400,000 innovation award from pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and London-based charity Save the Children.
“We are thrilled to be working with Friends of Sick Children in Malawi, and the University of Malawi College of Medicine to expand the Pumani program and begin replicating its success in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering and director of both BTB and Rice 360°.
“The award money from the GSK-Save the Children Healthcare Innovation Award program will allow us to extend the reach of this life-saving technology and save thousands of lives,” said Maria Oden, director of Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and co-director of BTB.
Pumani was one of five winning projects selected GSK and Save the Children from nearly 100 applications from 29 countries.
In other news this week, a separate University of Malawi College of Medicine proposal to expand the use of Pumani was named one of eight finalists for the first-ever $1 million Caplow Children’s Prize. The prize — the largest humanitarian prize dedicated to saving children’s lives in the world today — will be awarded next month in New York.
In September, Pumani was chosen by the United Nations as one of 10 “Breakthrough Innovations That Can Save Women and Children Now.” Thanks to the designation from the UN’s Every Woman, Every Child program, Pumani was displayed for the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 23 as part of an effort to mobilize governments, multilaterals, the private sector and civil society to address the major health challenges facing women and children around the world.
Later this month, GSK and Save the Children will convene a roundtable discussion with stakeholders and policymakers to honor the Friends of Sick Children in Malawi and to discuss the impact of the award on health innovation trends in Malawi.
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind for three Rice University bioengineering students who have spent much of the past two years constructing a robotic arm for a patient at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston.
Matthew Nojoomi, Sergio Gonzalez and Nimish Mittal have been interviewed by Good Morning America, presented their project at a national conference and gathered nearly 550,000 views on YouTube for a Rice-produced videothat showed the R-ARM in operation.
Rice students Matthew Nojoomi, left, and Nimish Mittal attach a robotic arm to Dee Faught's wheelchair during recent testing at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The arm built for Dee Faught, who lives with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease, gets closer to completion every day. A second round of tests took place at Shriners Sept. 30, and the students are tweaking the device for permanent use by the Friendswood high schooler.
Though they admit to frequent checks on the YouTube views, the three juniors have tried not to let the attention distract them from their primary mission — helping the 17-year-old Faught gain a measure of freedom he’s never experienced.
The device made possible by support from Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and the staff at Shriners was built at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. The battery-powered arm attaches securely to Faught’s motorized wheelchair and moves up, down and out, while the chair itself allows him to move the arm from side to side.
The device gives Faught an extra 4½ feet of reach. “We designed it so he can go all the way down to the ground and all the way up to the highest shelf on his cabinet,” Nojoomi said.
The team built a two-stage controller for Faught. Because the youngster is a videogame fan, they modified a familiar Playstation controller as a primary controller for the arm. Gonzalez programmed the heart of the system, an Arduino microcontroller, with C++, and the entire team added safety switches that stop the arm from traveling too far in any direction.
Sergio Gonzalez, one of three Rice undergraduates who built a robotic arm for a wheelchair-bound Shriners patient, positions the arm during a test. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
“We have padding on the arm and interference detection that stops it if he touches it on the side, because he kind of leans toward one side,” Nojoomi said. “It has controller monitoring, so if the controller is disconnected, it shuts off. And there’s an emergency off switch.”
“All the joints are limit-controlled so he can’t overrotate the arm in any direction, to make sure there’s no excessive wear and tear,” Mittal said.
The flat grippers are capable of lifting items up to three pounds with 220 ounce inchesof force from each of two servomotors. “Obviously, there are other factors that come into how much he can pick up,” Nojoomi said, noting the 195 foot pounds (a measure of torque) for the base and 160 foot pounds for the arm. The students set the base to rotate at 20 degrees per second and the elbow at 25 degrees per second.
They also added a foot-activated switch to release the grip. “We wanted Dee to be able to catch things with both hands that are too heavy for him to catch with one,” Nojoomi said. And the arm is deliberately set to the side of the chair so Faught cannot accidentally drop an item on himself.
With Faught’s help as a beta tester, the Rice students hope to build more affordable robotic arms and may continue their work after graduation. “If Dee likes it and it works well for him, we want to get it out to as many people as we can,” Mittal said.
It was a big day for Dee Faught when a team of Rice University students gave him a helping hand. In fact, they gave him a whole arm.
The bioengineering students won Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase and Competition last April for their R-ARM, a robotic device for Faught that fits his motorized chair. A video game controller allows Faught to manipulate the robotic arm. The students had the eager teen try a nearly finished version of the device Sept. 20 at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston.
Faught, 17, lives with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition that makes his bones especially brittle. The device will enable him to perform tasks most people take for granted.
“It will help him reach into the cabinets and get a cup or something he can’t get to from his chair by himself,” said his mom, Stacy Faught. “One of the things I’m excited about is that he’ll be able to pick up his laundry off the floor.”
Dee Faught picks up a shirt with a robot arm installed on his motorized wheelchair by Rice bioengineering students including Sergio Gonzalez, standing at left, and Nimish Mittal, right. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
“We’ve seen a lot of people tell him he’s not going to be able to do certain things,” said his dad, Keith. “Dee’s not one to say, ‘I can’t do it.’ He’ll figure out a way.”
Members of Team Brittle Bones undefined Rice juniors Matthew Nojoomi, Nimish Mittal and Sergio Gonzalez – designed the robotic arm. Faught’s doctor, Gloria Gogola, had suggested to their adviser. Ann Saterbak, that some students consider designing a device to help Faught. Saterbak is a professor in the practice of bioengineering education,
“I expected a high level of engineering talent,” said Gogola, an orthopedic surgeon at Shriners who has advised several design teams at Rice. “But I was astounded at the amount of sensitivity they had toward Dee. It gives me hope that there are young engineers out there who are so sensitive to people with special needs who are fantastic in their own right.”
Dee Faught, who is wheelchair-bound with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic disease that makes his bones brittle, will receive a robot arm built by Rice University students to help him be more independent. With him, standing from left, are Nimish Mittal, Matthew Nojoomi, adviser Ann Saterbak and Sergio Gonzalez. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
“It will help me be more independent,” said Faught, who lives with his parents and siblings in Friendswood, Texas. “Now that I’m going to get it, I can’t wait. Not many kids I know get to get a robotic arm.”
The students, who did the bulk of their work at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, hope to commercialize the product, they see themselves working on it even after graduation. They are applying for grants to further develop R-ARM and hope to work with advisers at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business to devise a business plan.
Gonzalez said he is aware of commercial robotic arms that cost upward of $25,000. The students made Faught’s arm for $800. “As we start producing more, the cost could go down even further,” Nojoomi added.
The team members are booked to discuss R-ARM this week at the Biomedical Engineering Society conference in Seattle, after which they’ll return to work on Faught’s robot. They plan to add a few more features they discussed with Dee last week before turning it over to him permanently. Then they’ll check in on a regular basis with the Faughts to see how things are progressing.
“We’ll set up a repair manual for his parents and for students at Rice so that even when we’re gone, they can bring the arm back and fix it up,” Gonzalez said.
Dee Faught picks up an orange during testing of the robot arm built for him by students at Rice University. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
Faught plans to attend Houston Community College for the next two years and then transfer to a school in New York to pursue a career in music. He currently DJs events, but would like to advance into production of his own and others’ music.
“He’s an incredible kid,” Mittal said. “I think that’s part of the reason we stuck with it. If it was just an abstract kind of project, we would have been less motivated. But the fact that we were building it for Dee drove us. We didn’t want to disappoint him.”
Last week, Faught was thrilled to see how far development of the arm has come. Once it was attached to the chair and the modified controller for the arm was in his hands, the team set Dee to work. They laid out objects on a bench to let him test the R-ARM, and after a bit of practice, they dropped items, including a shirt, on the floor as well. He positioned his chair, lowered the arm, pinched the fabric, lifted it to within his own arm’s reach and grabbed it … and gave his mom a knowing smile.
By PATRICK KURP Special to the Rice News
A simple design that evolved over two years and began with a mousetrap has won a team of Rice students top prize in the National Institutes of Health’s Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) competition.
It’s no longer a mousetrap, not even a better mousetrap, but a “low-cost, mechanical fluid regulator.”
“I guess the name isn’t as catchy, but the device (which no longer includes the mousetrap) is improved, and we know it will actually work in the field where it’s needed,” said Matthew Nojoomi, a junior majoring in bioengineering at Rice University and a member of the design team that created the award-winning IV DRIP (Dehydration Relief in Pediatrics).
Rice’s Team IV DRIP won in the category of technology to aid underserved populations. The Rice students will receive the $10,000 prize at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Seattle Sept. 25-28.
Members of the IV DRIP team have won a National Institutes of Health competition for their device to save children in the developing world. From left, Thor Walker, Melissa Yuan, Michael Pan, Erica Skerrett, Bailey Flynn, Matthew Nojoomi and Kamal Shah. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The other members of Team IV DRIP, all juniors in bioengineering, are Bailey Flynn, Michael Pan, Kamal Shah and Erica Skerrett. “The goal from the start was to regulate the amount of fluid delivered to children so we could prevent overhydration and dehydration,” said Shah, a member of the original team that organized two years ago. “It’s designed to be used in developing countries, where conditions are heart-wrenching and they may not even have electricity.”
Physicians working in Africa sparked the innovative design through discussions with Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden, who began traveling there seven years ago to seek real-world challenges for students in Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) program. Richards-Kortum is the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, which oversees BTB. Oden is a professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK).
“Physicians often told us they’d like a device to regulate IV-fluid delivery to children, who are often connected to adult IV bags,” Oden said.
A simple mechanical fluid regulator designed by students at Rice University has the potential to save lives. The device uses a lever with a movable counterweight to keep children from overhydration or dehydration. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The original design incorporated a spring-loaded mousetrap and was conceived in fall 2011 as a freshman project in ENGI 120: Introduction to Engineering Design, a course taught by Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of bioengineering education. The original team consisted of Paige Horton, Shah, Taylor Vaughn, Thor Walker and Melissa Yuan, and the students continued work in spring 2012 with Rice 360˚. In summer 2012, Shah and Yuan transported two prototypes to Malawi and Lesotho to evaluate them under field conditions. Malawi, in southeastern Africa, is among the least-developed countries in the world, with a high infant mortality rate and a life expectancy of about 50 years. Some 760,000 children in developing countries die annually of dehydration.
“IV DRIP will enable clinicians in sub-Saharan Africa to safely administer IV therapy to children, saving the lives of thousands annually,” Skerrett said.
The device is a mechanical, simple-to-operate volume regulator that uses a lever arm with a movable counterweight similar to a physician’s scale to incrementally dispense IV fluid. It uses the change in torque as the IV bag is drained to set off the spring that clamps the IV tube and stops the flow of saline solution or other prescribed fluids. Tests show the device dispenses fluid within 14 milliliters of the desired volume in increments of 50 milliliters.
Field-testing resulted in two significant changes in design. First, the original mousetrap was replaced by a safer, easier-to-use spring-loaded mechanism and equipped with two knobs to load it. Second, the working mechanism was lowered to permit easier access for short-statured health care workers.
“We are very fortunate to be part of a program that gives undergraduates the opportunity to travel to sub-Saharan Africa to obtain and incorporate end-user feedback into their devices,” Pan said
With the aid of two grants from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance and matching grants from the OEDK and the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, the team incorporated the changes into the device and created a third-generation prototype that costs about $80 to manufacture. In contrast, infusion pumps that regulate the maximum volume of fluids in an IV cost between $1,000 and $3,500.
Team IV DRIP has already received the 2012 Willy Revolution Award for Innovation in Engineering Design. Two years ago, during the first annual National Undergraduate Global Health Technologies Design Competition hosted by Rice 360˚ and Beyond Traditional Borders, the team won the People’s Choice Award for best poster. It also picked up the $500 Best Freshman Design Award at the 2012 George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase.
“The simple design of this device gives it the potential to have a widespread effect,” said Zeynep Erim, who manages the DEBUT competition for the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. “The ability to look at a problem in health care and create an inexpensive and viable solution for worldwide distribution is the type of thinking we want to encourage with this program.”
-Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.
Attendees at the OEDK dedication on Sept. 5 proceed down the staircase to the new space, henceforth known as "The Kitchen Sink." Photo by An Le
The best view at the expanded Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) at the Sept. 6 open house was from the bottom of the dramatic new staircase.
As students, faculty and alumni turned the corner onto the stairs, their eyes widened ever so slightly. Their looks said it all: “This is cool.”
From left, Engineering Dean Ned Thomas, Rice President David Leebron and OEDK Director Maria Oden perform the ribbon cutting at the design kitchen's re-dedication after a dramatic expansion this summer. The OEDK nearly doubled the amount of space available for student projects by renovating the basement. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
The OEDK, the campus workshop where Rice students have all the tools they need to bring their design projects to life, got a much-needed expansion over the summer. The basement has been reconfigured into workspace, offices and other facilities to handle a load that has grown since the Kitchen first opened four years ago. The space was rededicated by Rice President David Leebron at a private reception for donors Sept. 5.
“We’re so thrilled to be able to offer this expanded, state-of-the-art facility to our students,” said Maria Oden, OEDK director and a professor in the practice of engineering. “Even more teams and students will be able to take advantage of these great resources.”
She anticipates the new space will take on its own identity fairly quickly. “We’d been struggling to find a good name for the expansion,” Oden said. “We finally decided there was only one possible name: The Kitchen Sink.”
“The Sink” rounds out a facility that has been a spectacular success not only for the George R. Brown School of Engineering but also for students across many disciplines on campus. It’s not unusual to encounter teams working there that include music, social science, architecture, humanities and natural science students, all of whom bring passion and unique perspectives to solve the knotty problems they take on.
“I’ve been telling people who have never been in the building to come over and look at it,” said Ned Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the Brown School of Engineering. “They come in and say, ‘Wow, this is not a classroom. This is a sandbox, with tools.’”
Engineering Dean Ned Thomas (standing at right) holds court at a "Kitchen Sink" work table at the OEDK's Sept. 6 open house. Photo by Marilee Dizon
“At the OEDK, students work on real-world engineering challenges, problems brought to us by partners in the community, industry, the Texas Medical Center and doctors in low-resource settings,” Oden said. “These open-ended engineering problems are extremely challenging and often require solutions to cross disciplinary boundaries, much like the problems our students will face in industry.
“These are much more engaging for students than problems with one correct answer that can be found at the back of the book,” she said. “Students want to work on projects where they feel they can truly make a difference. This is what we try to provide.”
“We give students the resources and say, ‘Solve the challenge.’ Sometimes they don’t, but many times they do. That’s real engineering,” Thomas said.
He noted this year’s seniors have been able to work in the OEDK for their entire time at Rice. “Their design projects have jumped up in quality and complexity and deliverables compared with what they used to be, because they’re not coming in to design as seniors for the first time,” he said. “They were doing it as freshmen, and sometimes as sophomores and juniors.”
He recalled one freshman team’s pitch to Oden at the end of the year. “They asked if they could come back and work on their project as sophomores and she said, ‘You don’t understand. I can’t give you credit.’
“They said, ‘You don’t understand. We want access. We want to keep working on this.’
“There’s something in the water here that gets people excited,” Thomas said.
Rice engineering students have come up with what may be the geekiest possible way to spell out “RICE” and are happy to plaster the puzzler on the torsos of fellow students and friends alike.
The engineer-centric code appears on a T-shirt put up for sale at the George R. Brown School of Engineering’s annual ice cream social a few weeks ago. The first hundred shirts sold out, and a quickly printed second batch was on the way to another sellout at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) open house Sept. 6.
Andrew Stegner serves customers at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where sales of a puzzling new engineering T-shirt are supporting the facility.
The students, juniors Andrew Stegner and Will Kasper, will have more for sale at the Rice Engineering Alumni tailgate gathering at Rice Stadium before the Rice-Kansas football game Sept. 14. Proceeds from the $10 shirts support operations at the OEDK.
So what does it mean?
“We’ve taken equations and notations from science and engineering and spelled out RICE with them,” Stegner said.
“We have the Ideal Gas law. Typically PV equals nRT, and rearranged equates to R.
“We have electrical current, change in charge over change in time, dQ/dt, which is equal to I.
“Carbon, six electrons in the Bohr model, is chemically represented by C,” he said. “And we have Young’s Modulus, stress over strain, represented by E in an engineering context.”
Got that? Good. Class dismissed.
An artist's rendering of the now-renovated downstairs at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.
The campus community and the public are invited to an open house at the newly expanded Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) Sept. 6 from 4 to 6 p.m.
The OEDK has added more than 6,000 square feet of space for student projects by renovating the basement and incorporating a dramatic staircase.
OEDK Director Maria Oden, a professor in the practice of engineering, said she is delighted by the strong support the Rice community, alumni and collaborators gave to the project. “On a very short timeline, they helped us to raise funds so that we can continue to do what we do,” she said. “It allowed us to increase access to learning and give our students a great facility where they can get hands-on experience, working on real-world problems.”
The facility, which opened in 2009, gives engineering students the space and resources to tackle their senior capstone design projects. It includes conference rooms, a classroom, a wet lab, rapid prototyping equipment, large-format printers, a designated woodworking area, a machine shop and access to a welding shop. The expansion doubles the available prototyping workspace and includes a large electronics lab, a dynamic conference room, dedicated computer stations and office space for new faculty and staff.
Click HERE for directions and parking information.
The lives of Rice University professors Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden were forever changed by a visit to Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Malawi, Africa, in 2006. The pair hopes to return the favor this week when they deliver $375,000 in donations for a new neonatal ward.
The money was raised via the Day One Project, an ambitious and innovative effort that Oden and Richards-Kortum launched in May when they donated their $100,000 prize from the 2013 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation. They won the award for their pioneering efforts to inspire and lead Rice students to invent low-cost health care technologies for developing nations. And their donation inspired a new level of commitment among donors. In addition to several large contributions, more than 100 donors contributed smaller amounts online through an innovative “crowd funding” campaign driven by social media.
“Maria and I were particularly moved by the support from young Rice alumni and from young people in general,” said Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies. “One young man donated the $500 grand prize that he won last spring in an engineering-design competition for high school students.”
Together, Richards-Kortum and Oden have guided more than 3,000 Rice students through the invention process and overseen the development of nearly 60 health technologies that are helping 45,000 people in 24 countries.
Rice University's Day One Project is committed to providing a new neonatal nursery at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, the African hospital that has helped implement Rice's low-cost, student-designed health care technologies since 2007.
And neither professor has forgotten that first visit to QECH in 2006. At the time, they were still formulating their plans for Rice’s award-winning, hands-on engineering design and education program Beyond Traditional Borders. BTB was founded in 2006 with support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Richards-Kortum and Oden first visited QECH while laying the groundwork for BTB’s summer program. BTB sends about a dozen Rice students overseas each summer to work with partners in the developing world. There they test the prototypes that Rice students have created throughout the school year at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK).
“I’ll never forget that first visit,” said Oden, director of the OEDK. “There was great need, and it was clear that innovative technologies could make a tremendous difference. But there was also a great sense of hope. The staff at QECH is extraordinary. They are deeply committed to making a difference, and they were very open to innovation and to working with our students.”
QECH has hosted BTB students each summer since that first visit, and through the Day One Project, Richards-Kortum and Oden hope to meet two goals: significantly expand the hospital’s neonatal facilities and establish an “innovation hub” where Rice’s student-developed technologies can be proven and showcased for other Malawian and African health professionals.
“As Malawi’s largest teaching hospital, QECH trains the country’s next generation of leaders in medicine,” said Dr. Neil Kennedy, chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Malawi. “The doctors and nurses that train with the technologies available in the Day One Nursery will be able to carry forward the experience to their jobs in hospitals throughout the region, multiplying the impact of the facility.”
Ultimately, Oden and Richards-Kortum hope to use the Day One facility to create a collection of low-cost, neonatal technologies that a district hospital serving 250,000 people could implement for about $5,000.
To learn more, visit http://rice360.rice.edu/dayoneproject.
David Ruth713-348-6327david@rice.edu
Mike Williams713-348-6728mikewilliams@rice.edu
HOUSTON – (July 22, 2013) – Rice University nanotechnology researchers have unveiled a solar-powered sterilization system that could be a boon for more than 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitation. The “solar steam” sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert as much as 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into germ-killing heat.
The technology is described online in a July 8 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesEarly Edition. In the paper, researchers from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam can be used for sterilization — one setup to clean medical instruments and another to sanitize human waste.
“Sanitation and sterilization are enormous obstacles without reliable electricity,” said Rice photonics pioneer Naomi Halas, the director of LANP and lead researcher on the project, with senior co-author and Rice professor Peter Nordlander. “Solar steam’s efficiency at converting sunlight directly into steam opens up new possibilities for off-grid sterilization that simply aren’t available today.”
In a previous study last year, Halas and colleagues showed that “solar steam” was so effective at direct conversion of solar energy into heat that it could even produce steam from ice water.
“It makes steam directly from sunlight,” she said. “That means the steam forms immediately, even before the water boils.”
Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of physics, professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering, is one of the world’s most-cited chemists. Her lab specializes in creating and studying light-activated particles. One of her creations, gold nanoshells, is the subject of several clinical trials for cancer treatment.
Solar steam’s efficiency comes from light-harvesting nanoparticles that were created at LANP by Rice graduate student Oara Neumann, the lead author on the PNAS study. Neumann created a version of nanoshells that converts a broad spectrum of sunlight — including both visible and invisible bandwidths — directly into heat. When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency of around 15 percent.
When used in the autoclaves in the tests, the heat and pressure created by the steam were sufficient to kill not just living microbes but also spores and viruses. The solar steam autoclave was designed by Rice undergraduates at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and refined by Neumann and colleagues at LANP. In the PNAS study, standard tests for sterilization showed the solar steam autoclave could kill even the most heat-resistant microbes.
“The process is very efficient,” Neumann said. “For the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program that is sponsoring us, we needed to create a system that could handle the waste of a family of four with just two treatments per week, and the autoclave setup we reported in this paper can do that.”
Halas said her team hopes to work with waste-treatment pioneer Sanivation to conduct the first field tests of the solar steam waste sterilizer at three sites in Kenya.
“Sanitation technology isn’t glamorous, but it’s a matter of life and death for 2.5 billion people,” Halas said. “For this to really work, you need a technology that can be completely off-grid, that’s not that large, that functions relatively quickly, is easy to handle and doesn’t have dangerous components. Our Solar Steam system has all of that, and it’s the only technology we’ve seen that can completely sterilize waste. I can’t wait to see how it performs in the field.”
Paper co-authors include Curtis Feronti, Albert Neumann, Anjie Dong, Kevin Schell, Benjamin Lu, Eric Kim, Mary Quinn, Shea Thompson, Nathaniel Grady, Maria Oden and Nordlander, all of Rice. The research was supported by a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and by the Welch Foundation.
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VIDEO is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2DbVQ6AnDs
The following IMAGE is available at:
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SOLAR-1-WEB.jpg
Rice University graduate student Oara Neumann, left, and scientist Naomi Halas are co-authors of a new study about a highly efficient method of turning sunlight into heat. They expect their technology to have an initial impact as an ultra-small-scale system to treat human waste in developing nations without sewer systems or electricity. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
A copy of the PNAS paper is available at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11677
HOUSTON – (May 14, 2013) – A team of Rice University students has designed a new capo for guitar that won’t block players from making certain chords without cramping their fingers.
The capo is a clamp-like device that acts as a sixth finger across the strings.
The students’ attempt to build a better capo was inspired by Rice trustee and alumnus John Jaggers, managing general partner of Dallas venture capital firm Sevin Rosen Funds. In his spare time, Jaggers plays in an acoustic duo with his friend and fellow picker Matthew Carroll. Knowing from experience how well Rice students are trained to think about such issues, Jaggers approached engineering educators at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) to see if his idea struck a chord.
Jaggers said he and Carroll started talking about capos and decided changes were in order.
“I’ve been fairly involved in Rice and a big believer in the OEDK,” Jaggers said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a mechanical design challenge.’” He noted that he and Carroll are not mechanical engineers. “And frankly, we don’t have a lot of time to sit around designing capos. So I thought this might be a great project,” he said.
The team of A.J. Fenton, Eric Stone, Lisa Sampson, Nicki Chamberlain-Simon and Amber Wang took four months this spring to design and build a series of prototypes that flatten out the capo, sweeping the mechanical elements back and out of the way of flying fingers while retaining all the qualities good commercial capos offer: versatility, speed of placement and the convenience of being able to clip it onto the headstock when not needed.
Few think about all the problems the guitar poses for a capo maker. The device acts as the barre, taking the place of the index finger that spans the neck in a barre chord and depressing the strings just enough to create solid contact with the frets but not so much as to throw the tones off-pitch. That lets a player change the key of a song to match one’s vocal range without changing the basic chord shapes.
The capo also has to be forgiving enough to accommodate a variety of guitar necks, which not only change from guitar to guitar, but also along the neck of a single guitar. Finally, it had better not dig into the woodwork.
“Sometimes capos hurt,” the guitar-playing Fenton said as he demonstrated a commercial unit that juts out perpendicularly from the neck. “When you play this F major 7, it presses against your index finger and it’s quite uncomfortable, especially if you want to wrap your thumb all the way around.”
“Most people figure out how to make do and curse a little bit while they play, but it’s pretty awkward,” Jaggers added.
“There are a lot of nuances we didn’t think about before we started, like the curvature of the guitar neck or the materials we had available,” Wang said. “Every single part of the prototype we had to make ourselves. So we had to be creative.”
The students’ final prototype has a two-piece, spring-loaded plastic framework created on a 3-D printer with a hard rubber strip that contacts and gently clamps the strings. While it’s not yet perfect – the capo has to be placed just so – the teammates feel they’ve come a long way in four months toward the guitarists’ goal.
They expect the capo project will continue next year, perhaps with a new team of students to work with advisers Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of engineering education, and Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer in engineering.
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Watch a video about the capo project here: http://youtu.be/HwHlp79ld9Q
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Related Materials:
Rice Capo Team: http://oedk.rice.edu/Content/Members/MemberPublicProfile.aspx?pageId=1063096&memberId=9266280
Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen: http://oedk.rice.edu
George R. Brown School of Engineering: http://engr.rice.edu
Images for download:
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0513_CAPO-1-WEB.jpg
Rice freshmen created a capo that sweeps the mechanical elements out of the way of the player’s fingers to make it easier to play certain chords. (Credit: Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0513_CAPO-2-WEB.jpg
A.J. Fenton demonstrates the Rice Capo Team’s product, a prototype capo that is easy to move along the neck of a guitar while staying out of the way of flying fingers. A team of freshman engineering students invented the device. (Credit: Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0513_CAPO-3-WEB.jpg
Guitar player John Jaggers, a Rice University trustee and alumnus, brought the idea for a new kind of capo to students at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. (Credit: Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)
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