Life in Ranobe

The following photos depict work done by me and 3 other SNRE students for the organization Ho Avy to support the goals and missions of Ho Avy. Just to be super clear about who has credit, we (the students) designed the systems below based on existing information and desires as related to us by Ho Avy.

So these first two photos show the photovoltaic tracker system we designed for the roof of the research center. The frame is built to position the panels toward the east in the morning, horizontal at noon, and toward the west in the afternoon to follow the sun. It's manually operated, unlike automatic trackers in the States, but the simple motion of pulling a handle to shift the position once or twice a day should increase efficiency of the panels by up to 40%! (That's the value in Michigan; I haven't done the calculations for Madagascar yet, but it will be less since we're in the tropics.)

The third and fourth photos are of the solar dryer we're building. This is based on a model used by an engineering group at Michigan (BlueLab) that Patty and Brennan are part of, but it was adapted by us for Ranobe and the materials that exist here. The idea is that it functions much like a solar oven, but fruit or meat can be placed on woven trays/grills inside to be dried and preserved. Possibly sold in the market for income? Or else stored for the winter? (Ho Avy will decide what to do with the dryer.)

The funny part about the chiseling picture above is that although Brennan started chiseling the ledge for the glass panel to rest on, he *clearly* wasn't good enough to meet Malagasy standards. After a few minutes of our slow American efforts, one of the local men came over and chiseled the entire length of the board in maybe three minutes. The result was beautiful, like artwork, paper smooth and exactly to our markings. I aspire to chisel like that.

Then, on the non-construction side of things, we have Olivia and one of the village boys, Bula, laying a transect through a deforested section of the land. We've been going out in the mornings to map some of the more recently deforested areas, taking note of how many stumps are there, how many charcoal pits, and what the regrowth looks like. Eventually we'll do some hardcore data analysis to determine relationships to proximity to roads, the lake, the villages, etc. But that's a ways off. In the meantime, though, we have layered our data on top of Google Earth satellite images taken in 2004 and seen what a massive chunk of forest no longer exists. In six years?! It's shocking. Once we've produced the final version of the map and put it in our report so we can claim rights to it, I'll hopefully be able to post it here.

Next up is a photo of Brennan taking solar radiation data atop the research center roof. We're comparing different locations around the village and different times of day to see how the radiation changes. Bad news is that we couldn't afford a high-quality meter, so ours does not distinguish between direct and reflected sunlight. Good news is that we are recording more than 1000 Watts/m2 during the peak of the afternoon! So even if a percentage of that is reflected, that's still enough sun to bake chocolate chip cookies...

... pictured here...