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You gotta hand it to those people who are creating real-world solutions to real-world problems. Giant solar-collecting space lasers are pretty cool...but Sintex is for real. The Indian plastics company has created a very simple "digester" that takes something we have too much of (poop) and turns it into something we don't have enough of (energy).
The digester can actually take any organic material, including agricultural waste, kitchen scraps, or cow dung, and convert it to methane. This happens naturally, of course, and is happening in your septic tank (or at your sewage treatment plant) right now. The difference is that Sintex's biogas reactor has a little tube that moves the methane into a storage container. From there, the methane can be used for any natural gas application. Cooking, drying clothes, heating the home, boiling water, etc.
A "primed" digester (primed with cow dung, for a source of good bacteria) can digest all the waste of a four-person household and produce enough energy for that household to cook all of its meals! The device costs $425 and will pay for itself in less than two years. The Indian government has agreed to subsidize 1/3 of the cost of the units. In theory, that will actually save the government money, as they won't have to deal with the waste in other ways.
Sintex has only installed about 100 of the devices...but just wait. When real-world problems get real-world solutions, it's hard to hold them back from success.
Via Forbes
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written by sam clark, March 02, 2008
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written by holly, March 05, 2008
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written by Anozie Reginald E, October 10, 2008
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written by Anozie Reginald E, October 10, 2008
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written by tre, March 06, 2011
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written by Tom, June 01, 2013
In sewage treatment, primary treatment is solids separation and digestion is normally used, the gas usually for heating. This leaves secondary effluent that's half by weight water, half algae food so can be used to grow algae [not directly, must be diluted], the algae are very good water cleaners but take 2-3 days so to use this resource takes bioreactors to grow 24x7 to keep up, these are used in large-scale biodiesel production and centrifuges for harvesting as a batch at maturity.
My work is on a miniaturized purification system so a home-ranch-farm has potable water, gains a lot of biodiesel and the de-watered algae cakes are a good fertilizer to close the loop. This idea is starting to get traction in large-scale, single owner water treatment as it's easier-cheaper to treat water with specific needs and re-use it.
Bioreactors offer a way to allow the 2.5-days, that allows the pathogens to battle it out with common bacteria and without a host their populations are reduced to where they are removed from being a hazard. It also happens late in the process the algae do consume some types of bacteria as well so the pressed cakes have fewer bacteria.
By using Spirogyra from a local pond, it is a low oil-content species, 11%, but jumped wheat yields 25% and since there's no lack of wastewater, the fertilizer quality is what to hone, there's a lot of opportunities but the pathogen biology is the critical part for water purification and recycling.
Anyway, algae remove dissolved solids, the effluent gets cleaned in 4 steps so this concept is unlike large-scale, it's cleaning the water whereas the others are a batch process where they grow until the light is getting cut down by so many algae and they are mature so waiting longer means many start dying off.
With purification the priority, finally the water has so little nutrition to grow much so is given a tertiary, final step using filtration, activated charcoal is standard but now nano-tech is adding more options.
So for a home-farm-ranch you take what's going into the leach-field and give it mini sewage treatment so have a solids digester, bioreactors [I'm exploring harvesting continuously, typically a separate process using centrifuges], biodiesel machine, and finally a de-watering machine for the fertilizer.
As a coherent use of the resource what it means to a small farm is that you can power all the equipment with wastewater, so a dairy washdown means a lot of biodiesel plus you get the water back, the real value of that is huge, keeps me working on it.
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Normally, there is a caveat that makes it clear that human poodoo can not be used... as it contains certain organisms which .... well, it's not good to transmit them to compost or garden growth or the water table or... whatever.
So, if one is making strictly for methane... is it animal 'doo' or any 'doo' will do? I wonder since there are also so many looking at gray water recycling and even 'purified' water waste.