“Tactical Biorefineries” aka Generating Electricity from Trash
Posted Jul 07, 2007
Yes, really. The machine to the left is designed to convert garbage into electrical energy. (Click here for an enlarged version of the pic.) You feed it "food, plastics, and paper" -- regular kitchen-level waste -- and this beast will process the garbage into fuel then convert the fuel into electricity.
From the Scientific American article:
It works via parallel processes. The waste is first sorted?already standard practice at Army field kitchens, its first potential home?and then run through an industrial-strength shredder. The "ugly-looking gruel" that results, Warner says, separates into more liquid organic materials that funnel into a biocatalytic vat, and more solid materials?plastics?that find their way to a gasifying chamber. Inside the vat, enzymes and yeast?with a leavening of antibiotics for safety?digest the organic gruel into ethanol. Inside the gasifier, the plastic pellets turn to gas at temperatures of 600 degrees Celsius.
"As the waste material is introduced you can produce your gas from the gasifier within an hour and you'll start getting ethanol at six hours. By about 12 hours you can displace the diesel fuel to less than 10 percent," Warner notes. "It's scaled to take in about 2,500 pounds of mixed waste per 24-hour period."
The Defense Technical Information Center has an extremely detailed and helpful collection of documents for the public. Among them is the following gem: DTIC Report on "Tactical Biorefineries" Also check out this PhysOrg Report -- a good introductory read.
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