Ecofriendly cooling device developed by Delhi school students

A group of Class 10 students have created an eco-friendly, cost-effective, and portable device, which functions both as a heater and a cooler.

The device named Zephyrus has been developed by Lakshya Goswami, Armaan Sharma, Uday Singh, Sorish Grover, and V Sahil Seshadri of Delhi’s Shiv Nadar school. The students zeroed in on the simple and brilliant solution after they decided the past year to identify as well as address some of the pressing problems that the world faces. They did this as part of the school curriculum and studied the phenomenon of severe heatwaves that are getting generated due to climate change and its allied impacts.

The students came up with the innovation in order to battle India’s unprecedented heatwaves that have massively affected its population’s health and resulted in loss of working hours, productivity, and economic well-being — especially daily wage labourers and farmers, who have no choice but to work in the open spaces. Only 14.1% of households possess air coolers and it is only the privileged 4.9% of the households of the country that enjoy air conditioners.

Zephyrus is a bid to solve a classic problem. Presently, there are only two types of cooling devices in the Indian market, that is, ACs and coolers. Moreover, the weather is often so hot and humid that even a central air cooling mechanism fails to work. This is particularly true of the horrid conditions that people have to face while moving from indoors to outdoors and the vice-versa. Moreover, there are several other challenges. People need to refill water tanks regularly. Also, prolonged use of aircoolers leads to a humid atmosphere, with severely high levels of humidity. Thus, coolers become fail to offer any respite during the monsoons. The students wanted to create an innovation which which would benefit these users.

Thus, the birth of Zephyrus took place, which derives its name from a Greek god.

How does Zephyrus function?

Zephyrus is primarily a two in one heating and cooling system, which has been powered by cooling modules at the centre, each of which works through a thermoelectric device, put between two fin shaped aluminium blocks. “When electricity flows through Zephyrus, one side gets hot whereasand the other one gets cold, thus creating a temperature difference that is needed in order to create the effect of cooling.