The girls engage with their mentor at the earlier round of judging, pre-pandemic in 2020.
MIRI (Sept 24): Three resourceful girls from Miri have won international recognition for their contribution to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with their innovative invention to tap free rainwater to cool down homes for a more conducive study environment.
Winning the Shell NXplorers Grand Finals Malaysia last year, the SMK Lutong trio’s story is now featured on Shell’s global NXplorers website at https://nxplorers.com/.
Shell in a statement said the students’ determination to find solutions in cooling down the high temperature in homes to make studying more conducive proved fruitful when they emerged winners in the finals of Shell NXplorers.
“Hot and humid both indoors and outdoors, Miri has temperatures typically ranging from 24°C to 31°C while rainfall can reach 12 inches, and these conditions beg for climate solutions.
“Using the NXthinking tools picked up from the NXplorers workshop provided by Shell, Anisha Praveen Karunakaran, Daphne Douglas and Liew Jia Wen believed that there is an alternative to the costly and power-hungry air-conditioning system.
“With thoughts on Malaysians who live in rural settings without access to reliable electricity, they came up with an out-of-the-box answer to solving the sweltering heat using free, non-polluting resource from nature,” said Shell.
It said the girls’ research propelled them to re-imagine evaporating rainwater as a cooling system, providing rural homes with a way to keep cool without relying on unstable power supplies and expensive equipment.
They thus came up with Chillax, a prototype invention which is an affordable, innovative and eco-friendly alternative to air-conditioning units.
According to the NXplorers website, Chillax is a solar powered sprinkler system that utilises the cooling effect of evaporation to cool the zinc roofs common to homes in the area. The system uses stored rainwater and a battery, and is also connected to an app that the students designed and coded.
Using the natural resources available in abundance even in rural areas, and available at a fraction of the cost of an air-con, Chillax is a system that could feasibly help homes throughout Malaysia, and the rest of the world too.
“Capitalising on the evaporative cooling effect, the solution consists of an automated sprinkler system supported by rainwater, solar panel, temperature sensor and water pump as well as a mobile app to monitor and control the entire system.
“The result is a cooler environment at home which enables people to work and students to concentrate and study comfortably despite the oppressive heat.”
Shell said this project helped the students to see that they could create affordable climate management solutions without waste production, adding their invention also contributes to the United Nations SDG and helps improve social mobility for communities that would otherwise struggle to create productive learning environments for their students.
Shell’s NXplorers challenges school students to work in teams to design and innovate solutions to real-world problems within the nexus of energy-food-water.
For further information on Shell’s NXplorers, log on to www.shell.com.my.