The inventive minds of three teenagers from India caught the world’s attention with their salt-powered refrigerator. The portable fridge is intended to be used to improve healthcare by keeping vaccines and tools cooled without using electricity. They chose to name the invention Thermavault.
Dhruv Chaudhary, Mithran Ladhania, and Mridul Jain all have parents with extensive experience in the medical field, which likely inspired their invention. Long trips to rural areas meant that certain medicines and organs needed to be cooled for long periods, making it difficult to transport such supplies. The Thermavault uses a special kind of salt and water to dissolve the salt and remove the heat inside the fridge.
The normal kind of salt that we think of is only one out of many kinds of chemicals that are referred to as salt. After contemplation, they realized that hydroxide octahydrate and ammonium chloride were the best choices for this idea. Using these salts allowed the contents of the fridge to stay below freezing, which is the ideal temperature for most needed medicines.
This invention will be in high demand, once the product is further tested and can be reproduced on a massive scale. The teens have already tested their prototype at local hospitals and plan to make hundreds more to increase their findings across multiple other institutions. They were awarded the 2025 Earth Prize and the reward of $12,500. With this money and attention, we can only hope that the product will continue to impress and find a foothold in the medical industry.
