Research programmes

Solar Food Himalaya II (KU-SRC-II)

The lab's current work on sustainable solar food technologies for Himalayan regions, and the direct continuation of the five-year KU-SRC-I programme that closed in 2025. Where the first phase established how solar-based food systems behave in the Himalayan context, this phase carries that evidence toward technologies that can be built, maintained and repaired locally.

The Himalayan setting is the point rather than the backdrop. Altitude, a short and unreliable window of clear-sky hours, wide day-to-night temperature swings, and dispersed smallholder production all change what a dryer has to do — and they are conditions that equipment designed for lowland agriculture is rarely tested against. Solar drying is the lab's route into that problem: it reduces post-harvest loss without asking a farming household to buy grid capacity or fuel it does not have.

The programme is funded by the Swedish Research Council and sits inside ESTRL's longstanding Swedish research relationship; Lund University is among the lab's institutional collaborators. Dryer development at ESTRL is led by Project Incharge Navaraj Adhikari.

Related: publication themes · research team

Solar Food Himalaya (KU-SRC-I)

A five-year programme on solar-based food systems in the Himalayan context, and the longest single research engagement in the laboratory's history. Running a programme across five seasons rather than one is what makes the results worth anything here: a solar dryer that performs well through a Kavre autumn tells you very little about how it will behave in monsoon humidity or a winter with low sun angles.

The programme closed in 2025 and its findings now form the baseline for KU-SRC-II. It also built much of the practical capacity the lab depends on today — instrumentation, field measurement routine, and a cohort of graduate researchers trained on solar thermal work.

Thermal comfort & indoor air quality

A three-part study — literature review, survey, and data analysis — conducted across Nepal to establish what thermal comfort and indoor air quality actually look like in Nepali buildings, as opposed to what international standards assume. Comfort models developed for temperate, mechanically conditioned buildings do not transfer cleanly to naturally ventilated housing across Nepal's climatic zones, which run from the Terai plains to high-altitude settlements.

The work is explicitly groundwork for national standards: it is intended to give Nepal locally derived reference values rather than imported ones. Indoor air quality is the other half of the question, and it connects to a line of air-quality research the laboratory's faculty have published on since the 2009 study of PM_2.5 dynamics in the Kathmandu Valley.

Related: policy review · publications

Transition to electric cooking

Nepal generates most of its electricity from hydropower while importing the LPG that a large share of households cook with. Electric cooking is therefore both an energy security question and a household economics question, and this programme approaches it from three directions: field studies of how households actually cook, controlled efficiency testing, and a review of the policy instruments meant to drive the switch.

Efficiency testing uses the Water Boiling Test, the standard controlled protocol for benchmarking cooking devices. It gives comparable numbers across appliance types, but it is a laboratory proxy — which is why the field studies sit alongside it. A device that benchmarks well and then goes unused because it cannot cook the dishes a household actually makes, or because load-shedding makes it unreliable at dinner time, has not solved anything.

Method: Water Boiling Test benchmarking · household field study · policy review

Transition to electric transportation

Two strands. The first is an urban drive-pattern study: measuring how vehicles are really driven in Nepali cities, because duty cycle determines battery sizing, range requirement and charging behaviour, and imported drive cycles do not describe Kathmandu traffic or Nepali gradients. The second is modular electric vehicle design for rural Nepal, taken through simulation and prototyping — modular because a vehicle that can be serviced and part-replaced locally is worth more in a rural district than one that cannot.

The programme builds on published work by ESTRL faculty and researchers: a comparative life cycle assessment of internal combustion, battery electric and fuel cell vehicles under Nepal's hydro-dominated electricity mix, and a review of measures that reduce range anxiety among electric vehicle users. Charging infrastructure runs through both.

Related: life cycle assessment & range anxiety studies

Policies & guidelines review

The programme that turns the other five into something a ministry can use. It reviews three areas: energy efficiency provisions in Nepal's National Building Code, policy on indoor air quality and thermal comfort, and electric vehicle policy.

Reviewing policy alongside the measurement work is deliberate. A building code clause is only as good as the comfort data behind it, and an EV incentive designed without drive-cycle evidence tends to subsidise the wrong vehicle. Keeping the review in the same laboratory as the field studies is what lets the two correct each other.

Scope: National Building Code energy efficiency · IAQ & thermal comfort policy · EV policy