By Michael Rogers

Sustainability has caught fire at Caltech. Among many other initiatives, last year’s olive harvest, the installation of solar panels atop the Holliston parking garage, the establishment of green cleaning procedures for campus janitors, and efforts to make campus buildings environmentally friendly testify to the groundswell of campus activity in projects related to sustainability. One of the newest and most ambitious efforts is the creation of the Linde Center for Global Environmental Science, announced in April. Established by Ronald Linde, PhD ’64, and his wife, Maxine, the center will investigate global worldwide environmental change from a broadly based, multidisciplinary perspective. It is the latest in a series of Institute projects that not only focus on protecting local and global environments, but also extend to entrepreneurial ventures. Many of these are aimed at applying novel engineering solutions to improve conditions throughout the developing world.

Sustainability at Caltech may now be on the front burner, but it is hardly new. In the early 1960s, a few graduate students started a small recycling program on campus that has grown over the years. Since the mid-90s, the Institute has had an Electric Vehicle Club, maintaining electric cars and sponsoring various events. The recent heightened interest is not surprising, either, given the widespread recognition that the world’s growing population and rapid development in the Third World are straining Earth’s resources. The spectre of global warming brings a new urgency to concerns about the future of the planet.

“Sustainability and green engineering are the new buzz words on campus,” says Caltech senior Michael Ferrara, the president of the Caltech chapter of Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), an education and activist organization for young engineers. “Students are engaged because they have the knowledge and tools to contribute to the solutions of the global situation.”

Ferrara is one of many Caltech students who are not just thinking green but are actively involved in issues related to sustainability and socially responsible entrepreneurship. Besides meeting to discuss the world’s woes, some of them are starting projects, including companies, to address a variety of sustainability-related problems. One of their primary test beds is Guatemala, where a few Caltech initiatives are currently in various stages of development.

Deplorable living conditions in Guatemala influenced two Caltech start-up ventures that originated in a class focusing on improving conditions in the developing world through engineering.

Two of these projects originated in a class called Product Design for the Developing World, which is taught each fall by Visiting Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ken Pickar, who introduced the course in 2004.

“I was teaching engineering and design of products for a few years,” says Pickar, who worked at Bell Labs and has held senior research positions at General Electric Corporate R&D and AlliedSignal. “I was approached by the ESW group on campus, and they asked me if I could focus my class on engineering problems for people in the developing world. I agreed, provided they helped me write the curriculum.”

The class, which welcomes undergraduates and graduate students, as well as students from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, is basically a team-based crash course in solving small-scale but still significant engineering problems. It blends lectures and hands-on learning, with Pickar presenting classroom lectures on the product development processes—from conceptualization through prototype—while the students work to build a product to solve real problems of people who earn a dollar a day.

Guatemala entered the course syllabus in 2005 when a student who had traveled through Latin America suggested that Pickar focus on the Central American nation because of its needs and its relatively close proximity to California. With help from Mario Blanco, director of Caltech’s Process Simulation and Design Collaboration in the Beckman Institute—who, along with his wife, Luz Marina Delgado, an anthropologist, has close ties to Guatemala—Pickar was able to make contact with faculty members Oscar Arce and Ovidio Morales at Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala City. They, and their students, soon became the class’s partners as team members, providing a window into the country, suggesting potential projects via Skype, wiki, and e-mail. Members of the teams met in Guatemala prior to the start of classes, and for the last week of the quarter, the Guatemalan students flew up to Caltech to join their teammates and to make the final presentations together. In 2007, the lectures were teleconferenced, so that the Guatemalans could more actively participate in the class.

Zeal for Wheels

In the fall of 2006, Rudy Roy ’07 and Ben Sexson ’07 took Pickar’s course, and during a teleconference with the class, the students and faculty at Rafael Landívar University told them about the problems that poor, disabled people throughout Guatemala have getting wheelchairs. Many depend on their families for support, but with family incomes averaging just over $200 a month, wheelchairs, which can easily cost $400, fall into the category of out-of-reach luxury items. It’s a situation that keeps many of the country’s handicapped essentially imprisoned in their homes.

Roy and Sexson, together with their Caltech teammates Mike Easler and Cindy Ko ’08, and Alejandra Antonucci of Rafael Landívar University, knew that to make a practical wheelchair for Guatemalans, they would have to devise a vehicle that would be both durable and affordable. Sexson was sketching some prototype designs on a whiteboard when he realized that the profile of a wheelchair is remarkably similar to a bicycle’s. A big difference, of course, is that wheelchairs have four wheels and bicycles have two. “It was Ben’s idea to take two bikes and put them together to make a wheelchair,” Roy says.

Rudy Roy, Charlie Pyott, and Ben Sexson (left to right) prepare to cut a bicycle frame that will be transformed into a wheelchair. The computer design (above) shows an early version of the group’s wheelchair.

Initially, the team decided to construct their wheelchairs out of used bikes, since they figured that this would both bring down the manufacturing cost and promote recycling. By the end of the term, they had built a prototype, using two mountain bikes for the added durability that users would need to negotiate the unpaved roads and pathways in towns and villages. They cut up different sections of the bikes’ frames and reassembled them to create handles and other parts of the wheelchair. The seat and back were taken from pieces of a hammock, and casters were added for the front wheels.

At the end of the term, the wheelchair team won the course’s $500 first prize for the best design. After Sexson left Caltech in December 2006 and accepted a job as an analyst for a hedge-fund firm, Roy decided to continue the venture as an independent study project. He teamed up with classmate Dan Oliver ’07, and the two used the prize money to take their prototype to San Francisco to consult with a wheelchair design firm. The company uncovered all of the chair’s flaws, noting that it would probably give the users sores and could also tip over. “They ripped our chair apart,” admits Oliver. “They told us it was unsafe and that people would either hurt themselves or die.”

Undaunted, Roy and Oliver came up with new prototypes over the next two terms, using the Caltech student shop as their workshop. Although busy with jobs and other commitments, the rest of their former teammates, including Sexson, also volunteered their time. With the help of Charlie Pyott, a new team member from the Art Center College of Design, the group switched from reassembling old bicycles to using new ones, since it was hard to find two used bikes that matched, making it difficult to come up with a standard manufacturing procedure.

Over spring break in 2007, Oliver and Roy flew to Guatemala and met with the students who had given them the initial spark for the project. They also visited Transitions, a Guatemalan charitable organization that operates a wheelchair manufacturing and repair facility and donates wheelchairs to poor disabled people. Transitions has built more than 200 wheelchairs and refurbished more than 450, but Roy and Oliver discovered that in a country still recovering from a decades-long, brutal civil war, there is a need for thousands more.

After they got back to Caltech, the team started work on a business model, and when Oliver and Roy graduated, they launched Intelligent Mobility International (IMI), a nonprofit enterprise that will build wheelchairs for the poor in developing countries, starting with Guatemala. With the additional goal of empowering Guatemalans, Roy, Oliver, and several others who have joined the effort want their wheelchairs to be manufactured in Guatemala in shops staffed by disabled people.

“We don’t just want to give people a wheelchair,” Oliver says. “We want to involve them in society. We’re looking for ways of providing jobs for disabled people.” IMI also plans to design other mobility aids, such as improved prosthetics, crutches, and walkers.

“One of the biggest things we realized is that we could partner with Transitions to ease our way into the market instead of starting up our own shops,” Oliver says. “This way, we have a shop with tools and people with skills.” If that arrangement works, they say they might be able to expand their operation. But first, they have to perfect the chair.

Since neither Caltech graduate plans to give up his day job—Roy is a marketing associate for eSolar, a company in the Idealab group founded by Bill Gross ’81, while Oliver is a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace—each is currently involved with IMI on a part-time basis. After they graduated, Pickar decided to continue the wheelchair project in his product design class. By last April, a new group of undergraduates—including Dan Oliver’s brother, Thomas, and fellow junior Joseph Koehler—had helped design a new prototype that they were hoping would be suitable for production.

Intelligent Mobility International is currently talking with one of Central America’s largest bicycle manufacturers about purchasing bikes at cost, and with that arrangement in place, IMI hopes to soon begin wheelchair production in Guatemala. Earlier this year, Thomas and Joseph traveled separately to Guatemala to work out production details with Transitions, and Joseph returned to Transitions this summer to collaborate on building wheelchairs. Meanwhile, Thomas plans to visit several American universities this fall, partly supported by a $10,000 scholarship from the Donald A. Strauss Foundation. He’ll try to interest students on other campuses in launching IMI ventures in other developing nations.

As work moves ahead on finalizing the wheelchair, Thomas hopes that a new group of Caltech undergraduates will get involved in the fall. “There’s still a lot of hands-on work that needs to be done,” he says, including prototype testing.
“The first year is the hardest year,” Roy says. “When the operation kicks in, we eventually could make 300 to 500 wheelchairs a year in a small shop. I’d be happy to have gotten out 50 solid chairs by this time next year.”

“During our years at Caltech, we wanted to apply our knowledge to a project that would help somebody,” Dan Oliver says. “We’ve used our engineering skills to help solve a problem.”

“We’ve learned about people in developing countries and how what we have learned in school can help other people,” Roy says. “The ability to make a contribution is great for us. It’s been a great ride.”

The Latrine Team

The inadequate living conditions of the underprivileged in Guatemala became the impetus for another Caltech project that originated in Pickar’s class. George Cadena, MS ’08, a graduate student in electrical engineering, got his idea during a trip to Guatemala that Pickar’s students took during the first week of class in 2007. The students, whose expenses were paid by the Caltech Y, traveled to several towns and villages where Cadena was struck by discrepancies in the standards of living. The same towns that had elementary schools equipped with computers and many residents using cell phones often had deplorable living conditions, including unsanitary, filthy latrines and an almost total absence of plumbing.

Above left: The Caltech/Art Center group behind Eco-Loo includes (left to right) Adrianne Stroup, Bryce Butcher, George Cadena, and Albert Ng. Top right: a typical latrine found in a town in Guatemala. Above right: a scaled-down prototype of their portable latrine seat.

“I had never traveled to a poor country before, and going there with the mission of wanting to make a difference and start a sustainable business was a new concept for me,” says Cadena, who is interested in business and had previously taken Caltech’s other courses on entrepreneurship. On the last day of the trip, when the students gathered to discuss the problems they had seen, he couldn’t stop thinking about the local hygiene problems.

“There have been latrine projects in developing countries before, but nothing has stuck,” he says. “Nongovernmental organizations have come up with cool designs, and they’ve given out new latrines, but often people haven’t used them” or didn’t have the proper infrastructure to maintain them. Cadena noticed that one elementary school in a rural village had Western-style toilets, but there was no running water, and the facilities had become virtually unusable.

It didn’t take Cadena long to realize that these sanitation problems were related to sustainability issues. Guatemalans with small farms often use human waste for fertilizer, and some latrine producers had come up with complicated designs that separate liquids from solids to speed up the fertilizer-drying process. But those systems are expensive.
“We didn’t want to be the 501st latrine project,” Cadena says. “But I couldn’t get past the fact that no solution had prevailed over others and that the problem still existed.”

Cadena pitched the idea of designing a new latrine to Pickar’s class, and several students signed on, including Adrianne Stroup ’08 and two Art Center students, Bryce Butcher and Albert Ng. To determine why previous latrine projects had failed “we looked at as many latrine reports as we could get our hands on,” Cadena says. “One main issue was cost. People couldn’t afford them when they were struggling to put food on the table” or if they were a low priority. As for the latrines that were provided at no cost, the students, noting that they soon fell into disrepair, concluded that when the villagers got something for free, they didn’t have as much incentive to maintain it as compared to something they had bought—an observation that has lately been buttressed by laboratory experiments in economics. So the challenge was to develop an effective product that came with a modest, affordable price tag. An added consideration was “the cultural side of how it would be received,” says Cadena. “We could come up with a cool engineering solution, but this was going to be built over there and generate income for local Guatemalans. A complicated design would not be used.”

The team had several ideas for improving the latrine, including the addition of rudimentary plumbing and a better ventilation system. “But Ken taught us not to spread ourselves too thin. He said, ‘Don’t think low tech. Think below-the-earth tech.’

“We finally decided that the problem could be solved with simple products, and that first we should focus on the seat,” Cadena says. “Low cost—big impact.” The immediate solution was an inexpensive plastic seat that employs a funnel to separate different types of waste into different underground tanks. Since the seat is not attached to the latrine—a type of inner latch prevents slippage when in use—it can be easily removed and cleaned.

Butcher, one of the two Art Center students in the group, applied her design expertise and produced a scale model of the seat, using the center’s 3-D modeling machine. As the course neared its conclusion, the team started writing a business plan for launching the seat as their first product. It won the class prize for best design at the end of the term.
Once the course ended, they decided to keep the venture going by starting a nonprofit venture called Eco-Loo. Says Cadena, “The goal is to establish businesses that will manufacture the seats in Guatemala and other countries, providing a source of income for local partners. We see this as a real business. We want to impact as many people in as many developing countries as we can reach. Hundreds of millions of people use latrines. Ideally, we will establish a sustainable business that local workers can run with higher wages than what they are currently receiving.”
Eco-Loo expects that the seat will cost $10 and will come in a variety of colors. The company is also exploring different materials for prototypes and hopes to have a full-size prototype later this year, when Stroup plans on traveling to Guatemala to show it to potential manufacturers and customers to get feedback.

“This is a great opportunity to use design skills to help the world,” says Butcher. Adds Cadena, “We see this as an affordable luxury. It’s not something you definitely need, but you’ll feel good having it. Doing this was so much fun and there was pride of ownership in seeing the product and knowing that we’ll improve the quality of people’s lives. We can’t wait to see how it will impact people.”

Fuel to Burn

At the high-tech end of Caltech’s sustainability start-ups is Superprotonic, founded in 2003 by Dane Boysen, PhD ’04, and Calum Chisholm, PhD ’03, and their former adviser, Sossina Haile, professor of materials science and chemical engineering.

Based in Pasadena, Superprotonic is working to develop a new kind of fuel cell—an electrochemical device for converting chemicals into electricity. The timing would seem right: hydrogen-powered fuel cells have been touted by both energy experts and government leaders, including President Bush and California governor Schwarzenegger, as a promising alternative to oil because they produce only water as a byproduct instead of carbon exhaust fumes. But like many start-ups, Superprotonic has fought an uphill battle for recognition.

Most fuel-cell research has focused on polymer-based devices, which, despite substantial government support, have posed numerous problems, including an inability to operate at high temperatures, which greatly limits their effectiveness. Superprotonic is working on a nonpolymer-based alternative to this technology, called a solid-acid fuel cell, derived from research conducted by Boysen and Chisholm in Haile’s lab.

Hydrogen fuel cells produce energy by controlling the natural inclination of hydrogen and oxygen to bond together as water. The cell separates the hydrogen from the oxygen with an electrolyte, a material that allows only ions—in this case, the hydrogen protons, stripped of their electrons—to pass through, while the electrons flow through a circuit, generating the desired electric current.

The Haile group’s solid-acid research stems from a discovery by Russian scientists in the early 1980s showing that proton conductivity in solid acids jumps by 1,000 to 10,000 times at a certain temperature. They called this a superprotonic phase transition, from low to high protonic conductivity. While a fundamentally interesting phenomenon, applications for taking advantage of it did not materialize until Haile’s group came along several years later.

Superprotonic’s solid-acid fuel cells (an example of which is shown at left) may be just a few years away from use in commercial applications. Right: Calum Chisholm (left) and Dane Boysen helped start Superprotonic when their PhD advisor, Sossina Haile, thought that there might be potential to build a new type of fuel cell by exploiting an obscure electrochemical reaction.

The project began in 1997 when Chisholm, having just completed a year of graduate coursework at Caltech, walked into Haile’s office to discuss research opportunities in her lab. “She described the superprotonic transition and said that no one knew why it was happening and that she wanted to find out. It was dramatic and unexplained,” says Chisholm. But Haile, who came to Caltech in 1996 from the University of Washington, had another motive. She said that with the right materials, the superprotonic phase might serve as the basis for creating a new type of fuel cell. Intrigued, Chisholm signed on, and a few months later, Boysen, who had worked for Haile while he was an undergraduate at Washington, joined the effort.

Boysen and Chisholm began looking into exactly what makes superprotonic transitions occur. “It turns out that if you have just the right size ratio between the different atoms and molecules in the solid-acid compounds, they will transform to the highly disordered superprotonic phase because of greatly increased configurational entropy,” Chisholm says. In effect, the phenomenon is a turbocharged state of the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that in a system that’s not in equilibrium, “everything wants to get more disordered. If you drop a teacup, it will break, and if you have a cup of sugar, it will tend to spill. And these materials can get more disordered by going ‘superprotonic.’ However, there are some rules for determining if and when, at what temperature, a material can become superprotonic. Dane and I explicitly stated what those rules are. So you can say we wrote the rule book for making superprotonic materials.”

As the researchers were unraveling the mysteries of the superprotonic state, they became increasingly interested in actually building a solid-acid fuel cell. “We read some papers about how people make fuel cells and then worked out what we should do for our system,” Chisholm says.

After creating a fuel cell the size of a pellet, they heated their test fixture to a point above the threshold temperature for the superprotonic phase transition and began taking measurements of the cell’s voltage output. Their first fuel cell didn’t perform very well, but after making a few adjustments, they got a convincing voltage measurement, establishing the credibility of the solid-acid cell. “So, we went out and celebrated with a nice meal at a French restaurant, using money my dad had given me for a Christmas present,” Chisholm says. “No one had ever made a solid-acid fuel cell before. That was our eureka moment.”

Despite their euphoria, the solid acid that they created—cesium hydrogen sulfate—had a number of problems. It dissolved in water and it also reacted with hydrogen, which reduced its energy output over time. So Chisholm and Boysen conducted more experiments, trying out numerous combinations of chemicals, until they finally constructed a fuel cell in 2003 with all the properties needed to make it viable, replacing the sulphate material with phosphate, which was more chemically robust. Over the next year, they refined the fuel cell until they demonstrated that it could run for 100 hours.

Despite this success, initial efforts to commercialize their prototype were not encouraging. “We expected a company to take serious interest, but people in industry were skeptical,” Chisholm says. “They said, ‘Come back to us when you can show thousands of hours of operation at a cost that’s reasonable.’ We realized that we had to start a company to do all that.”

“It seemed that the only effective way to move this truly revolutionary approach to fuel cells into the marketplace was through a start-up,” says Haile, who had never launched a company before. In November 2003, Haile, Chisholm, and Boysen founded Superprotonic. “This is really their company,” says Haile, “and I never considered finding anyone else to do this. There is a view in the business world that a company should be run by someone who understands markets and not by scientists and engineers. I completely disagree. The deep knowledge that Dane and Calum have about the science of solid acids is what has made their success possible. They know precisely in what ways solid-acid fuel cells are better than other options, and they also know how to explain the advantages to a lay audience. I can’t imagine anyone else having moved things forward this much in so little time.”

Boysen and Chisholm have spent the past four and a half years both perfecting their fuel cell’s technology and meeting with venture capitalists and government officials to secure funding support. This July, they moved their modest operation—about 15 people working in a facility roughly twice the size of a 7-Eleven convenience store—into a new Pasadena building that has five times the lab space.

“We’re now in the phase of scaling up,” Chisholm says. While their current fuel cell can deliver tens to hundreds of watts of power, or enough to run electronics like a laptop or a DVD player, “the juicy applications are more in the kilowatt range,” which could supply energy for cars. “It can be done, but there’s a lot of engineering work to do. We believe in the technology and believe it could make fuel cells a commercial success on a massive scale.”

“At this point, we just want to see the technology out there,” Boysen says. “There’s too much potential for that not to happen.” Predicts Haile, “I am hopeful that complete Superprotonic power delivery systems will be available on a competitive basis shortly. Let me gamble and say two to three years.” And if the company decides to go public, Chisholm says, the earliest it would do an initial public offering would be in three years.

Now that they have shown the potential of the technology, Boysen and Chisholm aren’t surprised to see that other research groups are beginning to investigate solid-acid fuel cells. Even more satisfying is the promise that their technology will actually help people. “You can do a lot of great science, but if it doesn’t end up in the public sector, it doesn’t benefit anyone but you personally,” Chisholm says.

“When we first started working on this, energy wasn’t such a problem. Now it’s becoming an urgent national and global issue. I’m hoping that solid-acid fuel cells will be part of the process that makes us dramatically more efficient in energy production.”

For more information on these ventures, go to www.intelligentmobility.org, www.eco-loo.com, and www.superprotonic.com.