{"id":28181,"date":"2014-06-29T07:20:33","date_gmt":"2014-06-29T07:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=28181"},"modified":"2014-06-28T20:47:58","modified_gmt":"2014-06-28T20:47:58","slug":"nigerian-teens-create-generator-that-runs-on-urine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2014\/06\/nigerian-teens-create-generator-that-runs-on-urine\/","title":{"rendered":"Nigerian teens create generator that runs on urine"},"content":{"rendered":"
Here\u2019s some news that will be of interest to all of the people waiting in line for gas to use in their generators.<\/p>\n
Four teenage girls figured out a way to use a liter of urine as fuel to get six hours of electricity from their generator.<\/p>\n
Fourteen-year-olds Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, and Faleke Oluwatoyin, and 15-year-old Bello Eniola displayed their invention this week at Maker Faire Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, an annual event meant to showcase ingenuity.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how the urine-powered generator works, as explained by the blog on the makerfaireafrica.com website:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, and then into a gas cylinder, which looks similar to the kind used for outdoor barbecue grills.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The gas cylinder pushes the filtered hydrogen into another cylinder that contains liquid borax, in order to remove moisture from the gas. Borax is a natural mineral, commonly used in laundry detergent.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The hydrogen is pushed into a power generator in the final step of the process.<\/p>\n
A big drawback is that hydrogen poses an explosion risk. But the girls used one-way valves throughout the device as a safety measure.<\/p>\n
The idea of\u00a0using urine as fuel\u00a0is not new. The girls have come up with a practical way to put the idea into action, though. Their method for using urine to power a generator is one the average household can appreciate.<\/p>\n
Power generators are used far more often in Africa than the United States, where they are relegated more to emergency use, as in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The ‘Maker Faire Africa’ blog says power outages happen multiple times a day in Lagos, so all those who can afford a backup generator have one.<\/p>\n
Still, technology needs to evolve further before such a system is feasible, at least as far as applications like powering generators go.<\/p>\n
Gerardine Botte, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio University, is among those working on practical ways to make urine into a more useful hydrogen source, essentially by turning power into a byproduct of wastewater treatment.<\/p>\n
She says it takes more energy to extract hydrogen from urine than you end up getting in return as electricity. The energy equation gets even more skewed by the inefficiency of the generator used in the girls\u2019 project.<\/p>\n