Post date: Nov 21, 2012 1:42:56 PM
A group of Nigerian teenagers have developed a urine powered generator to counter the country's chronic electricity problem. It is estimated that more than half of Nigeria's 160 million citizens have no access to electricity and those who do, cannot guarantee having steady power everyday.
LAGOS, NIGERIA (REUTERS)-
14 YEAR OLD STUDENT OF DOREGOS PRIVATE ACADEMY, DURO-AINA ADEBOLA:
"What brought about this idea is when we saw on the newspaper, a family of five dying from carbon monoxide poisoning and in school we have a JETS (Junior Engineers, Technicians and Scientists) team and we are encouraged to bring up ideas, so we went to our teacher and we asked him that, Uncle what can be done about this idea and then we are taught in chemistry, elementary chemistry that all waste products produce energy, so can this energy be converted into power that can be used to generate energy or generate power so we looked into urine, and we also looked into water but we noticed that in water the hydrogen molecules are tightly bonded together, and in water it takes three volts to break up this hydrogen molecule bond; but in urine, it takes one point three volts, so we opted for urine, since, one, it's a waste product, and if we use urine as we carry out electrolysis, if we use urine, our waste product or our exhaust gas is going to be water and that's not poisonous to our environment, so we opted for urine."14 YEAR OLD STUDENT OF DOREGOS PRIVATE ACADEMY, DURO AINA ADEBOLA:
"This hydrogen gas mixture goes into our water filter and the function of the water filter is to remove any impurities from our hydrogen gas mixture. The hydrogen gas mixture then goes into our cylinder here which temporarily stores the gas when ever we need the gas. Then the gas goes into our borax and the function of the borax here is to dry the hydrogen gas to remove any moisture from the gas because if moisture gets into our… the engine of our generator, it can damage our generator, and then the gas goes into our generator."
HEAD OF SCIENCE, DOREGOS PRIVATE ACADEMY, LAWAL OLAIDE:
"You know people get repelled at the odour of urine, if it's their own urine, they don't mind, but somebody else's urine, they don't like touching, in order to avoid that we added two molar solution of washing soda at point one percent, inside the urine, once that is done it suppresses the odour of the urine so it has zero odour."
15 YEAR OLD STUDENT OF DOREGOS PRIVATE ACADEMY, BELLO ENIOLA:
"When we first …made the device, the project, the electrolytic cell exploded because the hydrogen oxygen gas backfired from the generator into the electrolytic cell and that caused the explosion, so when we now made the urine powered generator again, we inserted one way valves in the pipes of the generator, the pipes connecting the electrolytic cell to the generator so as to prevent the backfire so that incase the engine happens to backfire, the hydrogen gas won't be able to go back into the electrolytic cell."