Brits cycling in France should have a good supply of battery charge then ;)
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 …
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 07:22 GMT John P
Stop!
<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>
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 07:36 GMT auburnman
Re: Stop!
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
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 11:20 GMT C 18
Re: Stop!
>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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 20:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Stop!
@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.)
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Thursday 18th July 2013 01:55 GMT Martin Budden
Re: Stop!
(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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 07:47 GMT Steve the Cynic
Showers...
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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 12:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Showers...
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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 08:34 GMT JDX
Re: Giant piles of steaming.....
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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 09:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Giant piles of steaming.....
"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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 20:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Giant piles of steaming.....
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).
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 09:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
"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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 11:58 GMT Pascal Monett
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).
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 12:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
"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?
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 12:51 GMT TeeCee
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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 15:50 GMT Stevie
"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.
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Wednesday 17th July 2013 08:57 GMT John Smith 19
Oh please stop my sides are splitting from the laughter.
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.