A team of students led by Beena Sukumaran, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rowan University, have developed a remarkable new pedal-powered grain crusher that promises to become an effective and cheap food processor unit for the economically disadvantaged communities of the world. The aluminum grain crusher, though still in the development phase, attaches to any bicycle mounted on a stand and when the rider pedals, prompts the back wheel into turning a pulley that in turn moves plates in the crusher that crush the grains into smaller pieces making them more suitable for cooking. The effectiveness of the prototype, with an estimated price under $200, will be put to test when student teams traveling to El Salvador and Senegal later in the year will test the product on local villagers. With a similar bicycle add-on for a mechanical soil tiller in the works already, we can only hope that Sukumaran and her students will be rewarded positively for the efforts towards making life better for third-world villagers.
Source: Tree Hugger
