It’s easy to take that hulking great white beast of a machine in our kitchens for granted, but for the 1.3 billion people in the world who are living without electricity, a working refrigerator is not an option. So a team of students in Canada has invented a cooling device that not only works without any electricity whatsoever, it’s also cheap and portable, making it ideal for those in remote and rural areas who struggle to keep their produce fresh.
"We thought it would be good to decrease the amount of food waste in the world, and we came up with this design because it's easy to build and the materials are relatively cheap," one of the students, Michelle Zhou from the University of Calgary, told CBC News.
Dubbed the WindChill Food Preservation Unit, the device connects an air tube to an evaporation chamber, which connects to a sealed refrigeration chamber that looks a lot like an esky, the contents of which are cooled through the process of evaporative cooling.
