Passive Solar Food Dehydrator
Blue Mangoes, LLC
Blue Mangoes is a team of engineering and international business students who work in rural communities across the world to help diversify incomes and preserve the natural abundance of fruit.
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http://www.bluemangoes.orgMore Event Info
More Project Info
http://www.bluemangoes.org/
What inspired you to make this project?
I was 18 and 1 week into my freshman year in college at MSOE in the University Scholars Program. I was chosen to lead a group of my peers as we partnered with a nonprofit in Jamaica to build the country's first passive solar fruit dehydrator in the nigh-impossible relative humidity of 97%. Originally, my team was only brought along to participate in customer discovery for the eventual product the community would create in the Blue Mountains. However, by March of that school year, every other nonprofit and university had dropped out of the project, and it was our team of 18 year-olds who were left to lead every element of the design, prototyping, and implementation. We did a great job, and it inspired me to take the idea elsewhere, outside of school.
I'm a member of Engineers Without Borders and have both presented at the national conferences and been the structural design lead of our last bridge built in Guatemala. My passions for applying engineering to bettering others, and creating a level playing field, is what gave me the final push to take a leap with Blue Mangoes. My team members and co-founders are fellow students, some enlisted in the military and others studying in Spain. Together, we're working to help rural communities better leverage the natural resources they have through our low-barrier, low-cost technologies.