Electricity-Generating Merry-Go-Rounds in Ghana

BYU technology students and professor Charles Harrell worked with teachers at the Golden Sunbeam School in Essam village, Ghana, to install an electricity-generating merry-go-round. Some 10,000 schools in Ghana have no electricity.

“It’s a double dream come true,” says Monica Opare, founder of the Golden Sunbeam charity school, “because we are going to get equipment that the children can play with and then at the same time we are going to get electricity from it and that is exciting.”

“These villages and schools don’t have electricity. As children push the merry-go-round, it [generates] electricity that [lights] the school rooms,” says BYU professor Charles Harrell from the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology.  The first project was completed in 2008.

The project was co-sponsored by Empower Playgrounds, Inc. and BYU’s special Capstone project program, wherein technology students plan and complete projects for real business needs.

“Our objective overall is to improve quality of life in rural Ghana,” says Empower Playgrounds founder Ben Markham. “This project will enhance education by providing power for lighting, giving children opportunities for fun and also giving them a hands-on science laboratory.”

“In the rural villages the kids almost have no toys. I seldom saw the kids playing with anything other than a car tire or something else that could be used as a wheel,” says Markham, a retired engineer who served in Ghana as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

When he approached BYU about the project, Markham challenged BYU students to engineer a device that could generate power but would be fun, not work, for the children. To make it fun to ride, the students used a gearbox to multiply the rotation speed and incorporated circuitry to limit the amount of energy extracted from the system.

“The spinning is converted through a gearbox. The gearbox takes their rotation and multiplies it by 35, which then spins the generator and the generator is what converts that energy into electrical energy,” says BYU technology student Ben Drewry.

“So we’ve tried to balance fun, and getting an interesting amount of power from the device,” says Markham.

The power generated by the merry-go-round is stored in a car battery that recharges several dozen portable LED lights that can be used in classrooms and homes. Many families have little or no lighting in the evenings, relying on kerosene lamps, candles, or open flame “bobo” lights. Markham hopes that better lighting at home will lead to greater literacy and productivity for children and their families.

“Once the students have finished learning in the schoolrooms, they’re able to take one of these lamps home with them to light their homes,” added Harrell.

“We can right now have light for the kids, we can have evening classes, their parents can encourage them to do their assignments at home, and I can just imagine what it is going to be like; it’s like a liberation,” says Opare.

Although the current system is designed to charge the LED lights, Markham says the merry-go-round can be used for other applications.

“The amount of power available would easily recharge cell phones and laptop computers, which will probably be uses we’ll look to in the future,” he says.

With donor support, Empower Playgrounds hopes to bring inexpensive lighting and playground equipment to thousands of schools in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa.

BYU engineering and technology students worked more than a year on the prototype merry-go-round which is designed to be built with materials available in Ghana including recycled car parts.

“What we’d like to accomplish is not just to build a single prototype but to define a process, that is replicable, so that other facilities in Ghana, and in any part of the world, could duplicate this same process,” says Harrell.

In May, students from the Marriott School of Management met with Ghanaian education officials and made village school visits to identify site selection criteria for future Empower Playgrounds projects. In addition to the merry-go-round design, EPI is also investigating designs for an electricity-generating zip line and a swing set to provide additional play and power for village schools. For more information, see www.empowerplaygrounds.org.

Watch a short video about the project.

See the full report.

Read about Empower Systems’ Founder, Ben Markham.

University Students Share Through Service-Learning Programs

BY April Chalk

A few years ago when BYU students volunteered in Southeast Asia, they spent their time working in the fields. Today when students volunteer there, they spend their time teaching the people English. Why? The people they were working with told the students that they already knew how to work their fields and could do it alone, but if they knew English, they would be able to leave the fields and get a better job in the city. Read more