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BY YINGJIA WANG

In print | November 15, 2007

While students at Swarthmore have no doubt seen the signs in their bathrooms and laundry rooms encouraging them to conserve water and energy when they brush their teeth or wash their clothes, one senior has motivated herself to go a step further to help the environment.

Environmentalist and engineering major Lauren Goodfriend ’08 combined both interests when she decided to make her dorm room eco-friendly.

Goodfriend’s plan was hatched in the spring of 2006 when she read about students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had made significant adaptations to their dorm room.

“My initial motivation, oddly, was when sometime sophomore year I saw this article about these MIT freshmen who had totally tricked out their dorm room. They had a party button, and when they pressed the button the lights would turn off, the music would turn on, and such,” Goodfriend said.

While this party room intrigued Goodfriend, she wanted to replicate it in a more environmentally conscious way. Therefore, in the summer between her sophomore and junior years, Goodfriend researched various options for power generation and energy storage, and eventually settled on a system run on energy from solar panels.

According to Goodfriend, this system involves a solar panel bolted to a frame that is then attached to the outside of the building next to a window. When light hits the panel, it generates a current that then travels through wires that direct the energy to a large cutoff switch inside Goodfriend’s room.

The energy then continues through a charge controller to the batteries — the charge controller prevents the batteries from overcharging and ensures that the power does not run backwards from the battery.

Finally, the energy goes to an inverter that converts the energy from DC current to the AC current that is needed by the lights and computers in the room. While this system cannot power everything that may be present in a standard dorm room - for example an electric kettle, which demands too much power from the inverter - it does sufficiently power everything Goodfriend has designated.

The solar panel system was up and running in Goodfriend’s dorm room last school year, and has been put up again this school year with no significant modifications. “The system was working basically how I wanted it to, so there was no need to modify it. Also, I ran out of the money to modify it,” Goodfriend said. The total cost of the project hovered around $400, with most of the cost going toward the solar panel.

Having perfected her system of energy self-sufficiency, Goodfriend wished to take on another project.

“I was itching to make something,” Goodfriend said. Now she is designing and building an aeroponics system to grow vegetables. Similar to hydroponics, aeroponics involves growing plants without the use of soil.

However, while hydroponics still requires that the plants be soaked in water, aeroponics does not require the use of a growing medium. Nutrients are instead misted at the roots.

Engineering department chair and professor Erik Cheever ‘82 noted that Goodfriend’s desire to build things is shared by many engineering students and is due in part to the projects required by many engineering classes at Swarthmore.

According to Cheever, engineering majors at Swarthmore generally take fewer credits in their major than their counterparts at other institutions due to Swarthmore’s requirements that 20 out of the 32 credits required for graduation be outside of the major.

As a result, the department attempts to cram as much learning as possible into each credit by adding a lab requirement to each course — something that is generally not done at other schools.

Cheever said that the construction of a music visualizer at the hardware level, a notepad that can sit outside of a professor’s office while receiving notes from a professor who is sitting inside the office and a steel bridge that can be taken apart and put together to certain specifications, are among the projects currently being worked on by students in the department.

“I think that people think of engineers as drones, and I think it’s actually one of the more creative majors, in the literal sense of the word. When you’re done with an engineering course or project, you can point to a thing you’ve created. [You’re] taking something and using it for purposes that it may not have been intended for. You’re not just going out and buying stuff, but also figuring out how it works and doing more design for it,” Cheever said.

The engineering curriculum at the college, along with Goodfriend’s projects, has also inspired fellow engineering students.

“This is very cliché to say, but the way the engineering classes are structured, it just makes you think outside the box,” engineering student Travis Rothbloom ’10 said.

“I think that [Goodfriend] has set an example for young engineers like me to see how engineering can be very practical to our lives even now, not just in a few years to come,” engineering student Omari Faayke ’10 said.

Goodfriend says that she is not actually interested in going into energy as a profession, as she is more interested in groundwater quality.

However, Goodfriend sees her recent projects impacting her personal life in the future.

“I would like my residence to be powered by renewable energy, whether that be home-generated energy or energy bought from a grid,” Goodfriend said. “There’s something very appealing about generating your own power. As an educated environmentalist, I know that that’s not the best way. It’s a lot more efficient to buy, for example, wind energy from a big plant, but there’s still that impulse to be self-sufficient.”

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