Three Harvey Mudd College students and two faculty members met with the president of Iceland in July while in that country working on an HMC Global Clinic project related to renewable energy.

The special opportunity came about because engineering majors Alyssa Pierson ‘10, Masanori Honda ‘10, Rob Best ’10 and faculty members Lisette de Pillis (mathematics faculty and Global Clinic director) and Patrick Little (engineering faculty and Engineering Clinic Director) were supported by FATTOC to be part of a group participating in the summer school program of the Renewable Energy School (RES) based in Akureyri, Iceland. FATTOC, a company co-founded by HMC trustee John Benediktsson ’01, has an interest in supporting small-scale renewable energy research projects at HMC.

RES coordinators arranged the meeting with President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who spoke with the group about the importance of renewable energy and sustainability. Grimsson, whose country has the highest use of renewable energy per capita in the world, has been promoting the intelligent use of renewable energy resources and has been providing world leaders with insight into how their own economies might make the switch to more renewable sources of energy.

The presidential visit occurred at the beginning of the HMC group’s five-week stay in Iceland, where they learned about renewable energy, met their Icelandic student Clinic Program counterparts, and began work on their Clinic project. They attended lectures on geothermal, solar, hydro and hydrogen power, made site visits to working geothermal energy power plants and attended a workshop where they assembled model solar and hydrogen cars all the while interacting with classmates from around the world.

Four weeks of their stay were spent at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik where they worked with three students there to design, develop and prototype a waste heat collection system for an internal combustion engine of a car, a Clinic project being supervised by de Pillis and Little. “This research area is being actively explored as a method for powering the electronics of a car, thereby reducing the load on the engine by up to 15 percent and increasing the overall gas mileage,” said Rob Best ’10, president of the HMC environmental club Engineers for a Sustainable World/MOSS. This is Best’s second international trip while at HMC. He traveled to Kenya in January 2009 with ESW/MOSS to study solar water purification methods. “In an increasingly global world, I think that programs like this help students to realize the opportunities that lie elsewhere and the expertise that they can seek outside of Mudd.”

Alyssa Pierson found the RES program to be a great balance of classroom learning and site visits. “I enjoy learning about a particular theory or mechanism in the classroom, but it really clicks as soon as I can see it in application. The focus of many of the lectures was geothermal, mainly because Iceland is a leader in geothermal energy. However there were several days where we studied solar, fuel cell and hydro-power energies, giving us an overall well-rounded balance and introduction to renewable energies.”

Masanori Honda said the lectures helped him to see how mechanical engineering could be part of sustainability and renewable energy. “We went to a small hydro plant and I was able to see that a control system was involved in smoothly connecting the electricity produced from the plant into the main grid.”

The students also enjoyed the beauty of Iceland--they drove up to a glacier, waded in a warm mountain river and experienced the perpetual twilight of the region. “There’s just something about standing in a glacial snowfield at the top of a dormant volcano, looking down the side shaped by ancient lava flows, and in the distance seeing the coastline,” said Pierson.

The groundwork for the trip to Iceland was laid by President Maria Klawe and former Global Clinic Director Shenda Baker when they traveled there in March 2009 to explore possibilities for Global Clinics in geothermal and other green energy sources with the University of Iceland. That trip and a portion of this summer trip were sponsored by FATTOC, the company co-founded by HMC trustee John Benediktsson ’01.