Boffins want toilets to become POWER PLANTS Dr Ioannis Ieropoulos and colleagues from the University of the West of England's Bristol outpost and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory have claimed a world's first: powering a mobile phone with human urine. Detailed in the paper Waste to Real Energy: the first MFC powered mobile phone in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical …
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
<pedant>
What is it with El Reg this morning? This is the third story I've read with glaring grammatical errors, the others being http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/17/australia_reduces_microsoft_license_fees_by_aud100m_for_second_time/
and
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/17/spacewalk_aborted_after_helmet_fills_with_water/
Is the coffee machine broken?
</pedant>
Proofreading has been outsourced to schmucks like us who care enough to do it for free. Much as it grinds my gears, with the 24/7 news cycle of today taking the time to proofread every article is probably just too much time and effort for an organisation that provides its news free to its readers.
I think we should have a national pedant day though, at least one day a year where people are not just encouraged but obliged to rag on every little spelling mistake*. Then we could have a carnival in the evening where someone who habitually writes 'loose' when they mean 'lose' is picked at random an shot as an example to the others.
* I am aware that this complaint about spelling will have several spelling mistakes
** That doesn't have to happen, but it would be nice
>Proofreading has been outsourced to schmucks like us...
This is the inevitable progress of the internet.
Google did it to train their in-house algorithms, although they at least offered some money to the verification schmucks.
More and more corporates will use more and more of their consumer base as an extended (gratis) workforce.
Shareholders and directors love this type of thing.
I hope some erudite peruser of these comments can refer me to a fictional version of this type of thing in the collection of dystopian novels that we've accumulated.
@auburnman: "I think we should have a national pedant day though, at least one day a year where people are not just encouraged but obliged to rag on every little spelling mistake."
Isn't that just about every day on just about every forum - including this one?
(I swear, it seems to me that The Reg is following the same path Slashdot, Reddit, Kuro5hin, and all the other forums follow - serious posts downvoted, only trivial jokes allowed, echo chamber in full effect, deviate from the hivemind and be flamed.)
(I swear, it seems to me that The Reg is following the same path Slashdot, Reddit, Kuro5hin, and all the other forums follow - serious posts downvoted, only trivial jokes allowed, echo chamber in full effect, deviate from the hivemind and be flamed.)
Just like RL then ;-)
Must be that hoomin naycha thing I've heard about.
Article: "into domestic bathrooms to harness the urine and produce sufficient electricity to power showers"
When I had an electric shower (not a power shower, just an on-the-fly heater), it drew 8kW, so powering it on, um, byproducts may prove difficult. To power a shower for five minutes, you end up needing 2.4MJ or so, which you have to be able to extract from one day's byproducts (assuming you take one shower a day). (I'm ignoring the various inefficiencies related to extraction, insertion into storage, and removal from storage. These inefficiencies are likely to be significant.)
Sure, MFCs have been used in pilot plants. An Australian brewery produced 2kW from a tank of brewing wastewater. Um, let me make that a little clearer. A 660 gallon tank of brewing wastewater. No chance of powering a shower off your daily human waste, then.
The implication is that you could aim up, push hard, and let forth a stream of urine, showering you with urine. It would be body temperature, so, yes, a warm shower.
The second part refers to the sexual practice of what is colloquially known as a "golden shower", whereby one partner enjoys being urinated upon by the other.
It didn't seem too hard to understand.
That's through gas harvesting as the stuff rots though, right? This is a more direct approach, collect the energy the microbes use rather than the gas produced as a waste product. Or maybe you can do both... but there is a big difference between collecting methane from crap, and turning urine into an energy source.
"There are a few farms that heat their houses from big bio-digesters."
Any decent sized modern sewage treatment works puts the settled sewage sludge through anerobic digestors, and uses the methane for power generation (and the heat to keep the digestors warm). From memory (it was a bit before my time) the huge sewage treatment works that serves Birmingham had English Electric spark ignition generators installed back in about 1967, and some of the London sewage works were using sewage gas around 1910.
Given the relatively modest power generated from relatively efficient industrial scale plant, I'm not sure that extracting a bit of power from urine will really change the world.
A coworker of mine is a glider pilot. He was out in western Kansas, and was losing altitude, and getting ready to find a field into which to land (and then having to call people to bring the trailer out to haul the glider back to his home airport).
He found a thermal - from the waste of a feed-lot. He said he seriously debated with himself, the convenience of flying back home vs. having to endure the smell, which followed him all the way past 10,000 feet.
I've always laughed at:
https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.752275,-99.960244&spn=0.015693,0.029869&t=m&z=16
(from within the confines of my totally-sealed-up, AC on full recirculation, going the speed limit+10 past it car).
"I wonder if anyone ever actually did that, or calculated the energy you could achieve based on a good water pressure?"
Very little energy - you can calculate the potential energy by the head loss multiplied by the mass, and then just factor in whatever conversion efficiency you see fit. Typical pressure on a household water supply in the UK is about 4 bar (near enough 40 metres of head) , assume you leave the tap running nearly full tilt and you'd be pushing out around 1,000 litres an hour (depends on pipe bores and other head loss), so around a third of a litre per second.
Factoring in the various parameters (gravity, head loss, density, flow rate) you're looking at around 100 watts before conversion losses, which I'd guess at around 20% minimum.
In theory that would generate 700 kWh per year. Sadly the water company monitor network losses, and the near 9,000 tonnes of water you'd get through each year running 24/7 would result in investigations to find the leak. On a meter you'd be paying about £3/cubic metre including waste water charges, so to generate 700 kWh with a purchase cost of about £90 would then incur water charges of about £18,000.
Although in reality they'd just prosecute anybody this daft for wasting water.
Instead of wasting so much water, we could still include a turbine in the last part of the plumbing just before the tap. That way, wherever and whenever you draw water, some energy would be recovered.
A turbine right before the toilet reserve seems to be a must. Maybe e could put several turbines (probable loss-of-pressure issues there though).
"Instead of wasting so much water, we could still include a turbine in the last part of the plumbing just before the tap. That way, wherever and whenever you draw water, some energy would be recovered"
Of negligible value, though. In the scenario I posited above, the tap was on full bore, and the entire water pressure dissipated. In actual use you often use partial flows, short flows, and want some pressure at the tap all of which erode the potential generation. Your average UK domestic water user gets through about 200 cuic metres a year, so even you always turned the tap on full blast the potential energy is going to be 8 kWh per year, worth around £1 per household.
So how much are you offering your turbine and generator for?
More importantly, I'm sure that the water companies would spot the additional power consumption at the pumps they use to produce that water pressure and hike their prices accordingly.
The end effect would be that you'd be buying a very small amount of your electricity from them, via several hideously inefficient conversions.
"Nah, if you want free electricity from your bathroom, and you're not on a meter, just hook up your cold tap to a mini turbine generator and leave it on all day charging a bank of batteries."
A brilliant plan sir, and one that prompts my own humble effort: Mini turbines attached to the end of one's willy to recharge one's cellphone at the end of one's lunchbreak in The Dog and Duck.
Sadly urine is actually too pure for use as a feedstock, unless you've got a big collection point like a separate circuit for all night club urinals, or bus and train stations.
If it could handle all human waste (suitably slurried) that would be quite useful.
This is V 0.1 tech so guess what, it's not very efficient.
The trouble with fuel cells is the stuff plants most directly produce are sugars not alcohols or methane. I think this approach is promising. I'd like to see one that use microbial chemistry without the microbes (biomemetic) than actual cells.
A sugar solution would be like any other liquid fuel (except it's most unlikely to burn). Easy to ship, easy to make.
Thumbs up for this tech.
Urine is 95% water
Therefore it is ~5% 'food'
Let food have an average calorific density of 3 calories per millilitre.
The average daily urination volume is 1500 ml.
5% of 1500 is 75. Multiplying by 3 gives us 225 calories in a day's urine.
That's roughly 10% of our dietary needs.
Saving 10% off our total energy bill related to getting food from field to stomach.
Which is massive compared to the amount of energy we can probably extract from waste urine using MFCs.
Two pieces of advice:
1. Drink urine
2. Never admit it
The author does not drink has own urine.
I suspect that you have over-estimated the calorific content of a day's urine. The presence of nutrients such as sugars and proteins in the urine is normally a symptom of illness, so presumably the 5% should be mostly urea.
It's also not clear whether you're talking calories (i.e. energy to boil a cc of water), or Calories (used in dietary calculations, but strictly kilocalories).
Biologists don't do The Register, but if they did, they'd surely point out that there is no evidence in the animal kingdom of the use of urine as a source of calories where calories are scarce while there is plenty of evidence in of the use of urine as a source or water when that's scarce (another option is to excrete a urea paste and hold onto your water like many desert lizards do).
calories with a small c would be closer the mark. 0.225 calories per day's urine - about the same calories you'd find in 2/3 of a sunflower seed.
Would you bother with a sunflower seed if it was the size of a 4-pint bottle yet had the same calories as 1 and a third sunflower seeds?
It's no joke. I have a friend who went insane because of that confusion over calories vs kilocalories.
How does this compare to peeing on a micro turbine/propelling a dynamo? Or extracting energy from the heat of sewage?
Not that any of these would exclude the use of MFCs or each other. I'm only wondering where the highest potential is and hence worth exploiting.
(Beer icon as beer would probably be a major source of energy in this regard.)
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