Hai-Toh Lim's Thesis
The other day a big package came in the mail. Inside was Hai-Toh Lim's masters thesis "Solar energy as a form of supplementary energy for heating Alaskan Inuit houses".
Two years earlier Ms. Lim's supervisory mentor at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, had called. He had this eager architectural student who wanted to come to Alaska to try to design better houses for northerners, particularly in the windswept coastal regions, and to see to what extent solar energy could be used to heat them. Could Ms. Lim associate with the Geophysical Institute and could the Institute provide enough fiscal support to pay her board and room?
There really was no money, but later when Hai-Toh Lim herself called, her enthusiasm bubbling over the phone sorely threatened fiscal responsibility. Finally a legal and moral way was found to permit Ms. Lim's residency, and some months later Hai-Toh, all five feet of her, arrived behind a big smile.
During her tenure here, Hai-Toh Lim did far more than sit at the drawing board. With the help of the Institute's shop personnel she built a passive solar energy collector out of pop and beer cans, plywood and fiberglass. She installed it atop the Geophysical Institute and undertook a series of measurements that proved the effectiveness of the device.
Ms. Lim prepared three different house designs incorporating the beer can energy collector and boxes of gravel for storing the heat. She took the designs out into the villages--Anaktuvik Pass, Bethel, Eek, and Point Hope--to learn what people there thought of them.
Hai-Toh found that villagers were enthusiastic about certain features of her designs and liked the idea of being able to build the solar collectors themselves out of scrap and other readily available materials. They favored her incorporation of the cold trap entrances concept, the use of solar energy for heating bath water and her ideas on using movable pallets for sleeping and storage so as to make maximum use of limited space. And, of course, she got critical comments that required her to revise some of her ideas, especially about how she could support a heavy bed of gravel on the second story of a house.
Besides presenting her designs, Hai-Toh Lim's thesis reports on computer calculations and other evaluations that indicate the cost effectiveness of the solar collector. One surprising result is that, even at farthest north Point Barrow, the designs will pay for themselves in two to four years. A summary of her thesis is given by Ms. Lim in the latest Northern Engineer, a publication of the Geophysical Institute. Those interested in regularly receiving this highly readable quarterly can subscribe at low cost.
I think Hai-Toh Lim has made a substantial contribution to Alaska. Just how much her contribution cost Alaska is hard to judge exactly. Only a few hundred dollars were paid directly to her, but the indirect supporting services and the time of the many University professionals and faculty who worked with and assisted Ms. Lim--including Axel Carlson, Lee Leonard, Fred Milan, Richard Seifert, Gerd Wendler, Tunis Wentink, and John Zarling--were worth several additional thousands of dollars. Nevertheless, I'm sure Alaska always benefits from the presence of people like Hai-Toh Lim. She has gone to Quebec to look for a job now that she has finished her degree, but she says she would like to come back to Alaska to build one of her houses in a village.
