Enrique Mejia Solis

Healthier houses in the Peruvian mountains

Enrique Mejia Solis’s research interest is how to build warmer and healthier houses for the inhabitants of the mountains of his country, Peru.

These people sleep in poor one-room huts made of mud-bricks, dirt floors, and metallic roofs without heating systems, and indoor temperatures could be 0°C. Hundreds die annually because of the cold (link). In the last decade, the Peruvian Government has refurbished and built new houses for part of the population. Low-cost strategies should be use, e.g. installation of insulation or attach a greenhouse to circulate warm air (link), and biomass is hardly used for heating. There are few researches worldwide working in similar context.

Enrique is a Ph.D. student at the Energy Department of KTH (Sweden) working on the described topic. He is worried about how the housing conditions have been changing in the last decade; what is the impact of the Governmental refurbishments in the indoor temperatures and how they can be improved; and which new ideas could be try. He is using statistical methods to analyze the housing conditions across the country and computational software to calculate the indoor temperatures. He has a scholarship funded by the Peruvian Government but his project has no funding for a field study so he is actively looking for it.

Enrique has a bachelor degree in mechanical engineer and master degree innovation management.  All his professional experience has been related to installing energy technologies in Peruvian rural villages; e.g. access to water, electricity or food processing.

Enrique Mejia Solis

Phone: (+46) 700106656

email: enr@kth.se