Colombia.
A house with an electrical system that works with energy from the sun, captured by the bricks that shape the walls, and whose inhabitants can sell and buy electricity from a solar grid while monitoring energy consumption from their cell phone has been designed within a project called Helium, which is done in partnership between the EAFIT University, Mars and Dynacad technologies.
This is a research initiative that is developed by the hand of EAFIT Innovation, in which about 25 people have participated, including practitioners, graduates, professors and undergraduate and master's students of the departments of Product Design Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Physical Sciences of the University, and which began in August 2013 in response to a call for Ruta N -InLab2 Market-, and culminated in November 2014 with the creation of the solar brick.
The latter consists of two parts: the structural one, which is a ceramic block; and photovoltaics, composed of a cover of crystalline material, with two cells that capture sunlight and produce instantaneous energy. These are interconnected in series and can carry energy to batteries to store it, a process that has already been put to the test in the living laboratory located in EAFIT Llanogrande: a house of 50 square meters with its walls covered with solar bricks.
About the project, José Ignacio Marulanda Bernal, director of the Applied Electromagnetism Group (Gema), says that "the house was built between December 2015 and March 2016, and its eastern and western walls have 600 solar bricks to take advantage of the light of the rising and western sun. We estimate that a house needs, for normal energy use, with a small cooling unit, lighting, connectivity to charge cell phones and other things, between 2,500 and 3,000 watts, which is covered with about 350 bricks."
According to José Ignacio, in this first stage a solar clothing dryer for urban environments was also developed; solar trackers to allow the panels to follow the movement of the sun; a solar station on the campus of the Institution, for the recharging of electronic equipment; and the lighting of the parking lot and solar facades.
The resistance tests on the ceramic brick, in the words of José Ignacio Marulanda, yielded results much higher than what was required by the Colombian standard: "In the compression tests it exceeded by 40 percent the minimum required -12 tons, the weight of a dump truck- and reached a minimum of 18 tons. At times it withstood pressures of up to 25 tons, while in seismic resistance tests it withstood the limit of the University's seismic table."
Learn more at http://www.eafit.edu.co/sitionoticias/2016/en-eafit-hay-una-casa-que-se-alimenta-del-sol
