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Posted on 08/06/2014 9:42:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
“URINE and faeces to you”, explains a dodgy sewer-manager in one of Reginald Hill’s crime novels, “is bread and butter to me.” And he is not the only one. The BioEnergy Team, led by Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in Britain, are hoping to profit from working with the stuff too. They have developed a new technique to turn urine into electrical power—or “urine-tricity” as they call it.
People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year. BRL, a collaboration between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England, want to make the most of this abundant resource. At the core of urine-tricity are microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which contain live microbes. When urine flows through an MFC the microbes consume it as part of their normal metabolic process. This, in turn, frees electrons. Electrodes within the cell gather these electrons and when they are connected to an external circuit a current is generated.
The BRL team mounted a series of cigar-tube-sized MFCs into a single unit. Attaching this unit to the outlet pipe from a urinal allowed a stream of fresh urine to flow through the cells. Fresh, in this context, is urine not more than a week old from a healthy individual of average height and weight. Previous experiments had fed the MFCs food scraps, dead insects and grass cuttings. But urine achieved a power output three times higher than any other waste product.
Why does urine work so well? In the earlier tests microbes were quickly satiated on a heavy diet, Dr Ieropoulos believes. This was because the material contained a high proportion of organic matter. The low level of organic carbon in urine, combined with favourable acidity and electrical conductivity, made all the difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
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If you can develop an economically-feasible battery system of this type, urine the money…
If that were true my phone would be recharged 10 times a day and twice at night.
That’s a great photo!
Thanks!
welcome to the thunder dome,
two men enter one man leaves.
Just wait ‘til they levy a piss tax on us all. The pols will be given a nice, golden shower from us serfs.
in college, one summer I worked on a “Honey Wagon” and we used to say the same thing, although we used different names for the “Product”.
If I drink lots of beer will it extend the mileage of my Tesla?
Like the monkey said when he peed in the cash register “This is going to run into some dough!”
Sounds like something out of one of Jasper Fford’s wonderful “Tuesday Next” or “Nursery Crime” novels.
Don’t get all wee-wee’d up, now.
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