Zachary Dunn, a student in ecological engineering, coordinated a trip by OSU students to Kenya. (Photo: Lee Sherman)

How far would you go to help someone get a glass of clean water? Zachary Dunn knows exactly how far he’d go: 9,000 miles. And that’s just one trip, one way. By summer’s end, Dunn and fellow Oregon State University students had traveled almost 36,000 miles — greater than the Earth’s circumference — to help bring drinkable water to Lela, a tiny farming community in Kenya.

So why would engineering students fly halfway around the planet from bucolic Oregon to struggling East Africa, not once but twice? Why would Dunn say that contracting malaria on his first trip was a “small price to pay”? Why would he shrug off a State Department travel warning about terrorism and piracy in the region?

“In Lela, women and children walk up to three miles a day carrying 40-pound buckets of water,” explains Dunn, who grew up in Albany, Oregon. “I’ve seen kids as young as five with buckets on their heads. It’s a feat. They don’t complain. But the loss to productivity and education is huge.”

It’s not despite the chasm between the Kenyan village (where waterborne disease is common) and his Oregon hometown (where pure water flows from faucets and fountains at the twist of a wrist) but because of it that Dunn joined the OSU project in 2010 to survey water sources, test water quality and commission a groundwater survey. He and a student team headed back to Lela in July to help spearhead drilling a well and installing a rainwater catchment system.

“We all have a common fate,” says Dunn. “These kinds of projects can help shape the future of the world. It benefits all of us. It’s a win-win.”

During the dry season, women and children in Lela walk about three miles to get clean drinking water in a nearby town. (Photo: EWB-USA, Oregon State University)

That all-embracing, planetary vision is what led to Dunn’s participation in OSU’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA), which is dedicated to the vision of a world in which all communities have the capacity to meet their basic human needs. And it’s that vision that steered him to the Ecological Engineering program for his undergraduate work. The program, he says, is based on “systems theory,” the notion that everything is connected and, thus, solutions must be holistic.

“I’m interested in redefining the relationship between humans and the planet,” says Dunn, who describes himself as a “born tinkerer,” always tilting toward problem solving even in childhood.

The Lela Women’s Water Committee linked up with EWB-USA when they were looking for a partner on their quest for a better life. “We only partner with communities that have identified a need and have asked for help,” says Dunn, who will start graduate studies in public policy this fall.

The other EWB-USA requirement: The project must be sustainable. “A huge number of wells in Africa are in disrepair,” Dunn notes. “Many communities do not have the capacity to maintain them.”

That’s why EWB-OSU’s team of six (five students and one professional mentor) recommended a hand pump for Lela’s new well. Other power-source options, such as diesel or solar, cost too much to maintain or are targets for theft. With guidance from faculty and a groundwater expert from engineering firm CH2M Hill, the students have researched everything from the compressive strength of concrete (for the foundations under rainwater storage tanks) to the reliability and availability of pumps.

Zach Dunn celebrated with members of the women's water committee in Lela, Kenya, after completing a water project for the community. (Photo: Justin Smith)

In Kenya, Dunn and his team stay in a “simba,” a house made of wood and mud with a corrugated metal roof, on the land owned by village elder Charles Olang’o. The elder’s son Paul is the translator for the Oregon State engineers. A fast friendship has formed among the Kenyans and the students.

“We have a really special bond with Lela,” Dunn says. “Charles calls me his son; Paul calls me his brother. They are very gracious people.”

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Read updates and see photos of the Oregon State students’ work in Kenya.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth. It gave us golden, sandy beaches and sunlit kitchen windows. Beer mugs and home insulation. Silicon Valley in California and Silicon Forest in the Pacific Northwest. Personal computers and the Information Age.

And solar energy — in its infancy. But for this critically important energy source, which is one of the most promising of all the alternative energy forms, silicon may not be the only source.

Illustration by Gavin Potenza

“Solar energy has enormous potential, but to reach that potential with large-scale electrical generation we’re probably going to need something besides current silicon technology,” says Chih-hung Chang, professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University and director of the Oregon Process Innovation Center for Sustainable Solar Cell Manufacturing, or OPIC.

“We need huge improvements in solar cell manufacturing, to lower costs and reduce environmental impacts at the same time,” he adds. “Silicon will probably always be a significant player, but for mass commercial power production we will need additional solutions.”

Those solutions, OSU researchers say, may be with thin-film compounds that have an ability to outperform silicon by capturing more energy from photons at a lower cost, such as one called chalcopyrite that’s made from copper, indium, gallium and selenium. Or a less expensive but also promising compound made from copper, zinc, tin and sulfide.

There is one problem. Chalcopyrite doesn’t offer the crisp name recognition of Silicon Valley. So that’s bad. The wordsmiths may have to think of a catchy or colorful name.

But that aside, it could work better and usher in an era of high performing, rapidly produced, ultra-low-cost thin-film solar electronics. And it’s happening right now in Oregon.

Bay Area Partners

“We have five private companies already working with OPIC, including some Bay Area companies, and we’ve had discussions with several others,” says Greg Herman, an OSU associate professor of chemical engineering and associate director of the center. “So far this has attracted around $3 million in support, and Oregon is continuing to evolve as a focus of the solar energy industry.”

Earlier this summer, OSU researchers took an important step in that direction with a publication and patent application on a new technology that, for the first time, has created successful solar devices with inkjet printing. This rather pedestrian technology that decades ago revolutionized home and small office printing may now have unanticipated benefits for solar energy.

This novel approach reduces raw material waste by 90 percent. Instead of depositing chemical compounds on a substrate with more expensive vapor phase deposition — wasting most of the material in the process — inkjet technology creates precise patterning with a very low waste.

“Some of the materials we want to work with for the most advanced solar cells, such as indium, are relatively expensive,” Chang says. “If that’s what you’re using you can’t really afford to waste it, and the inkjet approach almost eliminates the waste.”

Power Conversion

So far, researchers have created an ink that can print chalcopyrite onto substrates with a power conversion efficiency of about 5 percent. With continued research they hope to achieve an efficiency of about 12 percent, which would make a commercially viable solar cell. In related work, Herman is continuing research with other compounds that might also be used with inkjet technology and cost even less.

Others are helping. OPIC is a collaboration of OSU, the University of Oregon, Portland State University, Oregon Institute of Technology, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, private industry and the Oregon Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center (Oregon BEST). Support is being sought from the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and Department of Defense. Collaborators are coming from Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.

In another advance reported last year, researchers used a “microreactor-assisted nanomaterial deposition” process to rapidly deposit thin films for solar cells, sidestepping more expensive processes such as sputtering and evaporation.

There may even be spinoffs that go beyond solar energy. Another application of these deposition processes is use of nanostructure films as coatings for eyeglasses, which could capture more light, reduce glare and cost less than existing coatings.

But solar energy is the primary target, and making Oregon a focus of that industry is a significant goal.

“We think with improved manufacturing processes and new materials, we can cut the materials cost of solar cells and produce these materials with low-cost, Earth-abundant materials in an environmentally sustainable way,” Herman says.