Our 'Urine powered generator' girls hit U.S, grab excellence award

Adebola Duro-Aina (left), Oluwatoyin Faleke (center) and Zainab Bello (right) designed a system that uses urine to produce a fuel. Generators that run on this fuel, rather than gasoline, would avoid spewing carbon monoxide, a toxic pollutant.

Remember the ladies who created the Urine-powered generator last year in science trade fair in Lagos?, Last week they were acknowledged in U.S .*wait..I got to check my words* *lol* I meant they were given the award for excellence in at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) held in Phoenix and they also were given $3000 in scholarship.

I really do envy them, if they get a patent for their invention you can tell how wealthy they would get..oomph! the twist in this story is that they all are secondary school students.. damn!

How this generator works;
To the body, urine is a waste. But to society, it could be a major resource, reports a trio of student inventors from Nigeria. They developed a system to produce fuel from urine. They do this by breaking down the water in urine to get hydrogen and oxygen. That hydrogen is a powerful source of energy. It’s also clean and readily available, the teens note.

In some parts of the developing world, electricity is not available all day. In other regions, its availability is unpredictable. “Where we live, almost everyone has a generator” to provide electricity at home, says Zainab Bello. She’s an 11^th-grader at the Doregos Private Academy in Lagos. Expensive gasoline powers most of those home generators, she adds.

But that fuel can have other costs as well. For example, the generators that burn gasoline can release a toxic gas called carbon monoxide. (In large amounts in an enclosed area, carbon monoxide can kill. It prevents blood from picking up oxygen.)

So, Bello and two classmates, Adebola Duro-Aina and Oluwatoyin Faleke, designed a system that uses urine as the source of a cleaner fuel. Their system provides as much electricity as one fueled by gasoline. But it doesn’t produce carbon monoxide, the students note. Exhaust from the team’s urine-fueled generator is not toxic. It’s just water vapor. (Indeed, one inspiration for the teens had been the death of a family that lived nearby. The carbon monoxide from their gasoline-powered generator had poisoned them.)
Another advantage to urine as a source of fuel: It’s plentiful. Each adult produces between 1 and 2 liters (1 and 2 quarts) per day.

The heart of the team’s system is an ordinary generator. Families can buy one at many home improvement stores. But the teens modified theirs to run on hydrogen gas, not gasoline. They use electricity produced by their generator to break down the water in urine into hydrogen and oxygen. (The chemical formula for water is H₂O. That means that each molecule of water contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.)


The teens then bubble the hydrogen, a gas, through more water to remove impurities. Finally, the gas passes through a chemical solution to remove any water vapor that might be present. Now the hydrogen is ready to burn as a fuel.

As the process suggests, it takes a good deal of electricity to get the fuel — hydrogen — separated from water. So in the end, it may still be rather costly to fuel a generator this way, at least in regions where gasoline is rather inexpensive. Its real advantage, therefore, might be its ability to greatly reduce toxic pollution associated with household power generation.

One liter of urine can produce enough hydrogen gas to run an electrical generator for 6 hours. (A gasoline-fueled generator needs about 7 liters of that fuel to run for the same length of time.)

The team presented its design May 13 in Phoenix, Ariz., at the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair. The Society for Science & the Public, which created the fair in 1950, still runs the competition.

cool!