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Kitchen Waste to Power Fuel Cells... Eventually
Max Romantschuk writes "Nikkei Electronics Asia reports that "The Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE) and Sharp Corp have developed basic technology for making effective bio-fuel cells". Apparently these fuel cells can be powered by regular kitchen waste. The future for technology like this should be rosy, taking into account the increased pressure put on all areas of power generation for more ecologically friendly alternatives."
I was going to say something about Mr. Fusion, but everybody else alredy has.
Seriously, this is a great advance in fuel cell technology. A lot of people think fuel cells are gods gift and don't realize that most fuel cells run on hydrocarbons (IE fossile fuel) or hydrogen. A fuel cell is probably the cleanest and most efficient way to burn hydrocarbons, but YOU'RE STILL BURNING HYDROCARBONS. You're still sucking dead dinosaurs out of the ground and pumping TONS of CO2 into the air that has been trapped under the ground for millions of years for a damn good reason. And hydrogen as a fuel has been stupid because it's costly to produce and has a super low energy density in a gasious form and is hard to store in a liquid form. The hydrogen fuel cell cars in the Tour de Sol a few years back didn't have back seats, instead they had giant carbon fiber hydrogen tanks.
So these guys found a way to produce the hydrogen IN the fuel cell, thus effectively eliminating the problems in producing, storing and transporting the hydrogen. Ingenious. I hope this is the direction society moves in, becoming more self sufficient and reducing waste. This device is a double whammy, it cuts back on household waste AND produces clean electricity.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
In case anyone else is interested, this is not quite a "dump your kitchen waste into the food processor-like chute" device, a la Mr. Fusion. The article specifically states that the organic material has to be liquified and refined to extract a glucose mixture that the bugs (which are the heart of the device) eat. Thus, if we want to use kitchen waste, it has to be recycled, in much the same manner that people who compost their kitchen waste save it.
The article goes on to mention that Sharp and Kyoto University hope that "such garbage glucose can be sold at retailers, much the way kerosene is sold today." I'm specifically interested in the refining process, its required energy inputs and its resultant waste stream, but couldn't Google up anything useful because I'm not familiar with organic chemistry.
Presuming that it doesn't take more energy to refine raw organic material into the glucose stockfeed than the device emits (in which case the utility of the device is its energy storage properties), and the waste stream from the refining process is benign in quantity and in its toxicity properties, this would be a very cool way to generate/store energy. They don't say how long a matchbox-sized device could power an LCD TV, but if the power density is anywhere near pure hydrogen cell-based units, this would be way handy for laptops and other portable devices. However, I'm a little skeptical that it could eventually even partially displace fossil fuels because the sheer quantity of glucose needed is probably impractical to produce.
In other words, the idea isn't that you'll buy a special fuel cell/garbage disposal and dump your kitchen waste in it to power your laptop, the idea is that you'll buy this glucose that's produced from kitchen waste, that then powers your laptop (or whatever). I'd imagine the kitchen waste would come from large commercial sources, not joe average selling his garbage.
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