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Rocket Thrusters Used To Treat Sewage
Zothecula writes "Rocket engines are generally not thought of as being environmentally-friendly, but thanks to a newly-developed process, we may someday see them neutralizing the emissions from wastewater treatment plants. The same process would also see those plants generating their own power, thus meaning they would be both energy-neutral and emissions-free. Developed by two engineers at Stanford University, the system starts with the formation of nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane gas — something that treatment plants traditionally try to avoid."
Because after a few minutes you just won't smell it anymore.
I've worked in a sewage treatment plant doing process pipe design. You don't smell it after about 5-10 minutes.
Probably because they approached the problem from the other direction (e.g. not looking for something to do with all that N2O, but looking for a source of the gas).
Brian Cantwell, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, has created clean-burning rocket thrusters that run on N2O. "We wondered whether nitrous oxide could be exploited as an emissions-free source of energy," Cantwell said. "Since the product of the decomposition reaction is simply oxygen-enriched air, energy is generated with zero production of greenhouse gas. But first we needed to find a cheap, plentiful source of nitrous oxide."
That source, of course, would be the wastewater treatment plants.
Seems like Cantwell developed the N2O rocket first and then looked for where to get fuel. He got in touch with Craig Criddle, "a professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford," and this idea was born.
Yes, but this process produces more methane along with nitrous oxide fuel. It then adds a method to reduce N2O to N2 and O2, producing more power in the process. In this way, the primary treatment plant produces 110% of its power requirements without increasing emissions simply by adding a piece of equipment the size of a basketball and removing a waste aeration system.
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Urine is the body's way of disposing of excess nitrogen: Urea (one of the components of Urine) has the chemical formula: (NH_2)_2CO.
Thus, there's plenty of nitrogen in the 'other organic materials' in waste water. Not every hydrocarbon is exclusively hydrogen and carbon - other elements can be present too.