Urine power generation that alleviates electricity problems for a billion people

Urine power generation that alleviates electricity problems for a billion people

There are currently more than 7 billion people in the world, and an average of 10.5 billion liters of human urine is produced and wasted every day. The urine fills 4,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. With the reduction of global oil supply and the continuous increase of greenhouse gases caused by coal, scientists have been searching for renewable and cheaper energy. If the methods of some scientists are feasible, then our human excreta will no longer be wasted.

Last year, researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK demonstrated that they could use human urine to charge a mobile phone. Their devices use microbial fuel cells (MFCs) to generate the amount of power they need. They believe that this technology will eventually provide electricity for the houses and even the entire village. Microbial fuel cells are essentially energy converters that use natural bacteria to decompose organic matter and produce electrons that are converted into energy.

Microbial fuel cells are currently one of the most effective ways to convert waste into energy. This research is not the latest, and microbial fuel cells first appeared more than a century ago and have also been continuously improved. In the 1960s, NASA began to use microbial fuel cells in space. In the 1980s, scientists began to investigate whether this battery is enough to provide energy for developing countries.

Ioannis Ieropoulos, the principal researcher of cell phone chargers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, has been working on this technology since 2002. They have recently adopted a new method to achieve breakthroughs. Other scientists have been trying to improve the energy efficiency of single microbial fuel cells to produce more electrons. But the Bristol Robotics team's approach is to put together a series of micro-microbial fuel cells.

The biggest hurdle this technology faces today is cost, size, and output. Although current solar cells provide more energy per unit, they are not long-lasting and cannot clean the wastewater. Even if this microbial fuel cell technology really helps us get energy, you don't expect your next toilet to have this kind of mobile phone charging device, at least not yet.

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