Posted on 11/12/2012 6:56:29 PM PST by jakerobins
Four African girls have created a generator that produces electricity for six hours using a single liter of urine as fuel.
The generator was unveiled at last week's Maker Faire in Lagos, Nigeria, by the four teens Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, and Faleke Oluwatoyin, all age 14, and Bello Eniola, 15.
So how exactly does the urine-powered generator work? •Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen. •The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, which then gets pushed into the gas cylinder. •The gas cylinder pushes hydrogen into a cylinder of liquid borax, which is used to remove the moisture from the hydrogen gas. •This purified hydrogen gas is pushed into the generator.
And as for delivering the fuel itself? Well, we'll leave that up to the consumer
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Just make sure you have the polarity correct or its like peeing on an electric fence.
Unfortunately, and expectedly, it stops working once they get pissed off!
That is where we place ‘em!
Great idea! Put one of these outside of every football stadium. Have the guys pee from the upper deck onto the water wheel. Enough juice to run the scoreboard!
They harness the bladder pressure of guys who haven't peed in a couple days.
According to the inventors the invention was for the time being an industrial secret. Police are currently seeking the source of the leak.
And so I can say, Piss Be Upon It.
and thats a good thing?? :P
Well if the police get involved it could be a sea change.
Hahahaha! This is so entertaining!
Once this becomes standard...here come the rap stars...
my stream aint no c stream, aint no b stream its a a stream, fully charged, I got power by the hour...etc
Maybe this will give Alanis Morissette a career resurgence...Isn’t it ionic...don’t you think.
It's got Electrolytes...
If you dont know make magazine it is a MUST. Maker Faire in the bay area every year is A MUST.
Urine, urout. Simple process really.
Bet they could get a solar-powered battery to do it. Actually not a bad idea, even tho I won’t retrofit my bathrooms for it.
20-35 g of urea, CH4N2O, is excreted daily in human urine in a volume of about 1 - 1.5 litres.
That's 1/3 of a mole/liter, so about 1-1/3 moles of H runs for 6 hours, so 1/9 mole of hydrogen/hour running time.
This gives ~32,000 joules used per hour running time, which comes to a whopping 8.9 watts/hour, or a total of ~53 watt-hours/liter of urine...assuming 100% efficiency throughout the system, including 100% recovery of the hydrogen in the urea in the urine.
Questions: What is the "electrolytic cell"; can it be be made cheaply, with local materials; how long does one last; can it be scaled to a useful level, or is it on par with a 'lemon battery'?
Oh, and a final questions: Did the generator run for 6 hours; or did the system require 6 hours to produce the hydrogen from the liter of urine; and, did they actually run the generator at all, or was it a 'conceptual' exhibit?
I would love to see a real report on this, rather than a journalist's story about it.
After 22 electrolysis hours, 13% of the urea was converted into hydrogen, nitrogen, and potassium carbonate, as determined using a heat treatment method for urea determination. We have demonstrated that urea at the concentrations found in urine can be used for the production of H2 through this new technology utilizing inexpensive Ni. The electrolysis of urine was also demonstrated via cyclic voltammetry (see ESIw, Fig. S4). Theoretically, hydrogen can be produced at $0.69 kg 1 based on an electricity cost of $0.07 kWh 1 and the proposed electrochemical reactions (eqn (1–4)) that have been developed from electrochemical data and gas analyses. Table 1 shows energy consumption (Wh per gram of hydrogen) and cost of hydrogen comparison between urea and water electrolysis at experimental conditions with Ni anodes.
Need a LOT more information on the girls' "6 hours on a liter of urine"; sounds like Gyro Gearloose's car that got "50 miles to the pint of peanut oil" in a 1950s Donald Duck comic book.
What part does the urine play in all this? It sounds like regular water could be used to achieve the same result.
Remembered this incident but forgot the guy’s name. All this guy needed was the water wheel.
“Gary Miller, host of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, is arrested in Cleveland for urinating out the second-story window of a bar, onto two off-duty police officers.”
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