THE UK’s Aston University is looking to tackle international crop waste by developing a mobile and sustainable refrigeration system for Malawi.
The University has received a grant of £241,075 from Innovate UK as well as other funding for the CoolRun project in Malawi, in southern Africa.
The researchers are to develop a mobile refrigerated box cooled by a phase-change material which can release or absorb sufficient energy to keep vegetables cool.
In most of Malawi, the electricity supply is unreliable, and the increasing cost of fossil fuels makes it expensive to operate internal combustion-driven generators and compressors.
Agriculture is the country’s key industry but up to 50% of crops harvested are left to rot because of lack of a reliable cold supply chain for potatoes and other vegetables.
The project will involve the creation a cool air blaster which will lower the temperature of the crops at a central location using a solar-powered refrigeration unit that also cools the phase-change panels. The food is then transferred to mobile CoolRun pods which can have their location and temperature monitored by both the supplier and the customer via a cloud database.
Aston University will be working in conjunction with its partners Hubl Logistics, Enterprise Projects Ventures Limited (EPVL), Malawi Fruits and Engineeronics Ltd in the UK and Modern Farming Technology (MFT) in Malawi.
The project will last two years. The Aston University team is led by Dr Muhammad Imran, Senior Lecturer in engineering and technology (pictured).
