Solar Autoclave for Rural Hospitals Using Aerogel as Transparent Insulation Material

An autoclave is a device which is used to sterilize surgical instruments in hospitals. Shortage of electrical power supply in rural hospitals and pollution due to fossil fuel lead people to find other power sources to run autoclave. The solar autoclave can be used in those places. At present, no commercial solar autoclave is available in the market. Many researchers have developed solar autoclave, but most of them needed tracking which makes them costly. This paper presents a non-tracking solar autoclave which uses compound parabolic concentrator to concentrate diluted sunlight and optically transparent and thermally insulating aerogel to reduce thermal losses from receiver surface. The collector was designed, fabricated, and experimented for sterilization purpose by using sterilization load requirements from nearby hospitals. The experiment shows that the aerogel collector with compound parabolic concentrator and polycarbonate sheet can generate saturated steam for sterilization.