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| Topic: Power To The PEEple ... | |
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Edited by
Kings_Knight
on
Fri 08/27/10 08:30 PM
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Seriously - that was just TOO easy ... but this is really a neat concept ...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20100827/981/tsc-urine-powered-fuel-cells-to-offer-pe_1.html Urine-powered fuel cells to offer pee power to people Fri, Aug 27 01:15 PM Washington, Aug 27 (ANI): This could literally be called pee power to the people-researchers have figured out a way to make the world's first urine-powered fuel cells. Chemistry postdocs Shanwen Tao and Rong Lan at Heriot-Watt University's School of Engineering and Physical Sciences in Edinburgh are turning pee into electricity and clean water with a prototype fuel cell system. I had heard about pee-power for robots, but not pee-power for everyone. While fuel cells usually rely on flammable hydrogen gas or toxic methanol to generate electricity, Tao and Lan's cheaper prototype relies instead on urea, an organic chemical compound produced as waste when the body metabolizes protein. Urea, also called "carbamide," has several advantages as a potential fuel source - it's abundant, non-toxic, relatively straightforward to transport and rich in nitrogen, reports Discovery News. According to the university, Tao thought about incorporating urea because he had seen it used as a fertilizer while growing up in eastern China. The Carbamide Power System prototype can break urea or urine from humans or animals down into water, nitrogen and CO2, and also produce electricity at the same time. Unlike existing fuel cells that require catalysts made from precious metals like platinum, the "Youtricity" research group's prototype uses a cheaper catalyst and less expensive membranes. |
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I wonder how much useful energy a litre of human liquid waste contains. There may be a lot of pee around, but it may not amount to much when you consider the useful tappable energy it contains per unit volume. Maybe we could instead build little mills in urinals that are powered by the gushing stream. Perhaps you could get enough wheat milled up to get a nice, hot, steaming croissant pushed out to you by a mechanical arm from above the urinal, right after you finish your no. 1. as your reward for a job well done. Also, I must say thanks to you for bringing this up. I've been trying to find out the meaning of a word in a Sting song, with the Police, in which he sings: "carbamide smell and acetilene lights..." it's a prison song, called "Invisible Sun". I could so far never find what "carbamide" was. I was actively curious for a long time, and it has been in the back of my mind to find out, and now I can die in peace. So now we know that prison cells smell like urine. You can't get that sort of information out of watching "Escape" or other prison shows. |
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