7 ms·

Four African girls create a urine-powered generator

134 points by jfc 14y ago

ColinWright 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752986 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752986 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Aurine http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Auri...
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  Is this all you do with your time on HN, post duplicate links? You're not actually helping and just cluttering the thread.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    ColinWright posts great articles to HN, and thoughtful comments to threads. He is a valued contributor. The duplicate thread posts are irritating to some people. But they are seen as very useful by many others. You claim that this single post is clutter and is not helpful. It is not clutter. It is helpful. It provides quick easy access to previous discussion. It would be great if people could link to the canonical version of an article, rather than each tech-blog's minimal write-up; and if people could search HN before submitting a post. But notice that ColinWright has not complained about duplication, and is merely providing useful links to previous discussion. You've been downvoted. Partly this is because you should either ignore, or down vote, or flag, posts that you think should not be here. (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) >Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
    - zbowling 14y ago
      he can't downvote yet.
    - kordless 14y ago
      I have a feeling he was kidding based on looking at his profile. :)
- kordless 14y ago
  Do you remember these, or do you do a search on each link? Just a-wondering!
  - ColinWright 14y ago
    I remember when I've seen something, and I've written tools to perform quick searches and create the text. I then confirm by hand, and copy-paste that text. It takes seconds if the search shows what I think I remember, and about a minute if I need to work harder. More, when I do the searches I often stumble across other items by accident, and I've made several happy discoveries in that manner, so I don't think of the time as wasted. In this particular case the search for "Urine" in the title turned up some other interesting articles in addition to the earlier one for this story, one which already had discussion, which people may have missed without the cross-reference.
scjr 14y ago
> 1. Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen. How does this part work
- jhuckestein 14y ago
  IIRC you stick an anode and kathode into the urine, separated by a semi-permeable membrane. This takes power of course. I'm not entirely convinced yet. Saying something gives you "6 hours of electricity" means nothing. My watch battery gives me years of electricity for example.
- negativity 14y ago
  If you stick a pair of charged contacts in a container of water, you'll see bubbles produced at each contact. The cathode produces hydrogen. Go get a 9 volt battery and try it right now. Just drop it in a cup of water. Presto! Hydrogen! Use solar power as a source of electricity, and who cares about efficiency?
  - VBprogrammer 14y ago
    The people who get the bill for the solar panels presumably.
  - ars 14y ago
    So what does that have to do with urine? Use the energy from the solar panel directly, why convert it to hydrogen and back to electricity?
    - Luyt 14y ago
      The idea is that their electrolysis unit is fed by the generator, which is in turn fed by the hydrogen from the electrolysis unit. To make the contraption somewhat more scientific-looking (and less suspect), they've put two water filters in the loop, presumably to 'purify' the hydrogen.
      - stcredzero 14y ago
overgun77 14y ago
I honestly don't understand all the money and hype around "world changing" startups that creates a product or service that offer some kind of amusement/entertainment or solving a "real world problem" such as the need to know what restaurants are near one person or how much one spends in potatoes. I wish projects like this had more support, from offering sponsorship or scholarship to the people involved in the project to do more research or prototypes, to big companies offering to help on the research of that project, something like that, and hopefully leave aside the cookie-cutter world changing android app we see every week and start focusing on things that matter. I have the feel we have become a stagnant society as far as innovation and discoveries go, we focus all our energy, money and interest in entertainment rather than in discovery and humanity development.
- ars 14y ago
  It's a nice sentiment, but this project isn't real. They are basically using those girls for publicity.
DanBlake 14y ago
Unfortunately this looks to be mostly puff-press since we are dealing with a trifecta of minority-in-startupland (black, female, third-world country) This weird contraption obviously uses more power to make hydrogen than it takes to run it. (Unless we are breaking some laws of physics?) I also see no mention of why using urine is better/worse than just using regular water. I am guessing because "Putting electricity in water generates hydrogen" is a less exciting title.
- Luyt 14y ago
  What's more, they're leading small (?) quantities of hydrogen into a metal container which (presumably) hasn't been vacuum-emptied beforehand, and so will after a while contain an air+hydrogen mixture, which while technically not oxyhydrogen, can still be ignited and make the metal gas tank explode like a pipe bomb.
  - bathat 14y ago
    The first time I tried to write this comment, I was a little flip, because I'm not sure if you're trolling. Purging the container is very easy and requires nothing more than fire (which I think Africans have), water (I am sure they have this), a vessel for boiling the water (ditto), and a moment's thought (the linked article seems to suggest this is locally available too). It does not require any vacuum pumps. Step 1: Fill the vessel with water and start a fire Step 2: Fill the hydrogen container with water and invert (so the open side is down) Step 3: Hold the hydrogen container so that the opening is just below the surface of the water-to-be-boiled Step 4: Wait for water vapor to fill the hydrogen container. You now have a hydrogen container filled with water vapor and trace amount of atmospheric gases (the ones dissolved in the water and the ones adsorbed to the surface of the container). Since the urea electrolysis process produces only "dryish" hydrogen gas (the borax stage is used to remove water vapor from the as-produced hydrogen), it does not matter that the hydrogen container initially contains water vapor. At this point, the user can either cap the hydrogen container (which will produce a poor vacuum as the water condenses) or immediately start filling it with hydrogen. If conservation of borax is important (probably not, since I suspect that it can be dried fairly easily) one could prime the system by purging the hydrogen container with as-produced hydrogen to reduce the water content to an acceptable level before connecting it to the borax stage.
thorick 14y ago
while I applaud the initiative, someone might want to explain to them what 'Rube Goldberg Machine' means... As others have commented there's no gain here, it would be just as well to store the solar or wind power that charged the 'electrolytic cell' and keep the energy there rather than then using that captured energy to separate out the hydrogen. edit: as some have pointed out, yes one could just run the wind generator 'directly' into this device and use the intermittently produced hydrogen as the storage mechanism..
- outworlder 14y ago
  Except that hydrogen (in gas form) is not that easy to store to begin with and likes to leak from containers. The most efficient hydrogen storage we know is... fossil fuels.
nsxwolf 14y ago
Sounds like this system puts out less energy than it consumes.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Do any (eg gasoline) generators put out more energy than they consume?
  - DanBlake 14y ago
    Sorta different situations. This contraption is extracting hydrogen from urine. Gasoline engine just consumes/runs on gas. Whats being said is that there is skepticism that the hydrogen extraction takes more energy than the hydrogen yield you receive.
  - miahi 14y ago
    There is no pure energy generator. All the generators are transforming one form of energy to another. The chemical energy from gasoline is transformed to heat (thermal energy) + mechanical energy + other forms of chemical energy (CO, CO2 and others). The mechanical energy is then transformed into more heat and electric energy (if we're talking about an electrical generator). What makes gasoline a good energy "producer" is the simple way the chemical energy can be released and the percentage of usable energy (the efficiency of the generator). What makes other substances bad energy producers is the efficiency and complexity of changing the energy to usable energy (like mechanical or electrical energy).
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - verroq 14y ago
    More energy is given off from burning petroleum than it is taken from extracting it from the earth.
jt2190 14y ago
Here's a link to google's cache of the original blog post on Maker Faire Africa's site: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Tim1l5Ay4UJ:makerfaireafrica.com/2012/11/06/a-urine-powered-generator/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Tim1l5...
jtchang 14y ago
I am awestruck that there may be a day we all have urinals in our bathrooms because it helps lower our electricity bill.
csmatt 14y ago
My friend works for a small startup in SF called Fenix International. Their device for providing power in places like Africa is much more promising www.fenixintl.com/
- jackpirate 14y ago
  You could at least explain the basics behind how the device works rather than making us type in a url. As it is, I have no interest in looking into your friend's product.
  - csmatt 14y ago
    Sorry, I posted from my phone just before a meeting. The device is called ReadySet and is a high-quality personal power generation unit with battery for storage. It can be powered by putting it beneath the rear wheel of a standard bicycle or the included 15-watt solar panel. http://www.fenixintl.com http://www.fenixintl.com http://kck.st/LP5NjI http://kck.st/LP5NjI
mistercow 14y ago
>1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity. "Hour" is not a unit of energy.
bitteralmond 14y ago
Anything that uses electricity to take hydrogen out of water will use more electricity than it produces.
- gammprog 14y ago
  http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf
  - HarryHirsch 14y ago
    When you read this paper closely you will recognize that the authors have discovered a way to remove bound nitrogen from effluent. It's possibly an advance over the well-established biological reduction of nitrate, considering that instead of putting energy in in the shape of methanol you can recover a part by burning the hydrogen the process generates - possibly in the sewage gas plant that you already have on site.
gammprog 14y ago
Did anyone read "http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf linked within the article. That's a paper that illustrates direct hydrogen production from urine without electricity (a chemical process)! Making the whole idea a little more plausible.
jfc 14y ago
These girls banded together and built something. Whether it's a rousing success or ends up being a bad idea, there is something positive to be said for their efforts. If you consider the cultural context in which they are operating, they deserve praise for this. Heck, we praise people who build failed webapps here in the US, in part because it's an exercise in execution. When people build new things, it's great even if it doesn't work out, because who knows what it could lead to?

134 points by jfc 14y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752986 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752986 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Aurine http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Auri...

sergiotapia 14y ago
Is this all you do with your time on HN, post duplicate links? You're not actually helping and just cluttering the thread.
- DanBC 14y ago
  ColinWright posts great articles to HN, and thoughtful comments to threads. He is a valued contributor. The duplicate thread posts are irritating to some people. But they are seen as very useful by many others. You claim that this single post is clutter and is not helpful. It is not clutter. It is helpful. It provides quick easy access to previous discussion. It would be great if people could link to the canonical version of an article, rather than each tech-blog's minimal write-up; and if people could search HN before submitting a post. But notice that ColinWright has not complained about duplication, and is merely providing useful links to previous discussion. You've been downvoted. Partly this is because you should either ignore, or down vote, or flag, posts that you think should not be here. (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) >Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
  - zbowling 14y ago
    he can't downvote yet.
  - kordless 14y ago
    I have a feeling he was kidding based on looking at his profile. :)
kordless 14y ago
Do you remember these, or do you do a search on each link? Just a-wondering!
- ColinWright 14y ago
  I remember when I've seen something, and I've written tools to perform quick searches and create the text. I then confirm by hand, and copy-paste that text. It takes seconds if the search shows what I think I remember, and about a minute if I need to work harder. More, when I do the searches I often stumble across other items by accident, and I've made several happy discoveries in that manner, so I don't think of the time as wasted. In this particular case the search for "Urine" in the title turned up some other interesting articles in addition to the earlier one for this story, one which already had discussion, which people may have missed without the cross-reference.

scjr 14y ago

> 1. Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen. How does this part work

jhuckestein 14y ago
IIRC you stick an anode and kathode into the urine, separated by a semi-permeable membrane. This takes power of course. I'm not entirely convinced yet. Saying something gives you "6 hours of electricity" means nothing. My watch battery gives me years of electricity for example.
negativity 14y ago
If you stick a pair of charged contacts in a container of water, you'll see bubbles produced at each contact. The cathode produces hydrogen. Go get a 9 volt battery and try it right now. Just drop it in a cup of water. Presto! Hydrogen! Use solar power as a source of electricity, and who cares about efficiency?
- VBprogrammer 14y ago
  The people who get the bill for the solar panels presumably.
- ars 14y ago
  So what does that have to do with urine? Use the energy from the solar panel directly, why convert it to hydrogen and back to electricity?
  - Luyt 14y ago
    The idea is that their electrolysis unit is fed by the generator, which is in turn fed by the hydrogen from the electrolysis unit. To make the contraption somewhat more scientific-looking (and less suspect), they've put two water filters in the loop, presumably to 'purify' the hydrogen.
    - stcredzero 14y ago

overgun77 14y ago

I honestly don't understand all the money and hype around "world changing" startups that creates a product or service that offer some kind of amusement/entertainment or solving a "real world problem" such as the need to know what restaurants are near one person or how much one spends in potatoes. I wish projects like this had more support, from offering sponsorship or scholarship to the people involved in the project to do more research or prototypes, to big companies offering to help on the research of that project, something like that, and hopefully leave aside the cookie-cutter world changing android app we see every week and start focusing on things that matter. I have the feel we have become a stagnant society as far as innovation and discoveries go, we focus all our energy, money and interest in entertainment rather than in discovery and humanity development.

ars 14y ago
It's a nice sentiment, but this project isn't real. They are basically using those girls for publicity.

DanBlake 14y ago

Unfortunately this looks to be mostly puff-press since we are dealing with a trifecta of minority-in-startupland (black, female, third-world country) This weird contraption obviously uses more power to make hydrogen than it takes to run it. (Unless we are breaking some laws of physics?) I also see no mention of why using urine is better/worse than just using regular water. I am guessing because "Putting electricity in water generates hydrogen" is a less exciting title.

Luyt 14y ago
What's more, they're leading small (?) quantities of hydrogen into a metal container which (presumably) hasn't been vacuum-emptied beforehand, and so will after a while contain an air+hydrogen mixture, which while technically not oxyhydrogen, can still be ignited and make the metal gas tank explode like a pipe bomb.
- bathat 14y ago
  The first time I tried to write this comment, I was a little flip, because I'm not sure if you're trolling. Purging the container is very easy and requires nothing more than fire (which I think Africans have), water (I am sure they have this), a vessel for boiling the water (ditto), and a moment's thought (the linked article seems to suggest this is locally available too). It does not require any vacuum pumps. Step 1: Fill the vessel with water and start a fire Step 2: Fill the hydrogen container with water and invert (so the open side is down) Step 3: Hold the hydrogen container so that the opening is just below the surface of the water-to-be-boiled Step 4: Wait for water vapor to fill the hydrogen container. You now have a hydrogen container filled with water vapor and trace amount of atmospheric gases (the ones dissolved in the water and the ones adsorbed to the surface of the container). Since the urea electrolysis process produces only "dryish" hydrogen gas (the borax stage is used to remove water vapor from the as-produced hydrogen), it does not matter that the hydrogen container initially contains water vapor. At this point, the user can either cap the hydrogen container (which will produce a poor vacuum as the water condenses) or immediately start filling it with hydrogen. If conservation of borax is important (probably not, since I suspect that it can be dried fairly easily) one could prime the system by purging the hydrogen container with as-produced hydrogen to reduce the water content to an acceptable level before connecting it to the borax stage.

thorick 14y ago

while I applaud the initiative, someone might want to explain to them what 'Rube Goldberg Machine' means... As others have commented there's no gain here, it would be just as well to store the solar or wind power that charged the 'electrolytic cell' and keep the energy there rather than then using that captured energy to separate out the hydrogen. edit: as some have pointed out, yes one could just run the wind generator 'directly' into this device and use the intermittently produced hydrogen as the storage mechanism..

outworlder 14y ago
Except that hydrogen (in gas form) is not that easy to store to begin with and likes to leak from containers. The most efficient hydrogen storage we know is... fossil fuels.

nsxwolf 14y ago

Sounds like this system puts out less energy than it consumes.

DanBC 14y ago
Do any (eg gasoline) generators put out more energy than they consume?
- DanBlake 14y ago
  Sorta different situations. This contraption is extracting hydrogen from urine. Gasoline engine just consumes/runs on gas. Whats being said is that there is skepticism that the hydrogen extraction takes more energy than the hydrogen yield you receive.
- miahi 14y ago
  There is no pure energy generator. All the generators are transforming one form of energy to another. The chemical energy from gasoline is transformed to heat (thermal energy) + mechanical energy + other forms of chemical energy (CO, CO2 and others). The mechanical energy is then transformed into more heat and electric energy (if we're talking about an electrical generator). What makes gasoline a good energy "producer" is the simple way the chemical energy can be released and the percentage of usable energy (the efficiency of the generator). What makes other substances bad energy producers is the efficiency and complexity of changing the energy to usable energy (like mechanical or electrical energy).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- verroq 14y ago
  More energy is given off from burning petroleum than it is taken from extracting it from the earth.

jt2190 14y ago

Here's a link to google's cache of the original blog post on Maker Faire Africa's site: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Tim1l5Ay4UJ:makerfaireafrica.com/2012/11/06/a-urine-powered-generator/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Tim1l5...

jtchang 14y ago

I am awestruck that there may be a day we all have urinals in our bathrooms because it helps lower our electricity bill.

csmatt 14y ago

My friend works for a small startup in SF called Fenix International. Their device for providing power in places like Africa is much more promising www.fenixintl.com/

jackpirate 14y ago
You could at least explain the basics behind how the device works rather than making us type in a url. As it is, I have no interest in looking into your friend's product.
- csmatt 14y ago
  Sorry, I posted from my phone just before a meeting. The device is called ReadySet and is a high-quality personal power generation unit with battery for storage. It can be powered by putting it beneath the rear wheel of a standard bicycle or the included 15-watt solar panel. http://www.fenixintl.com http://www.fenixintl.com http://kck.st/LP5NjI http://kck.st/LP5NjI

mistercow 14y ago

>1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity. "Hour" is not a unit of energy.

bitteralmond 14y ago

Anything that uses electricity to take hydrogen out of water will use more electricity than it produces.

gammprog 14y ago
http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf
- HarryHirsch 14y ago
  When you read this paper closely you will recognize that the authors have discovered a way to remove bound nitrogen from effluent. It's possibly an advance over the well-established biological reduction of nitrate, considering that instead of putting energy in in the shape of methanol you can recover a part by burning the hydrogen the process generates - possibly in the sewage gas plant that you already have on site.

gammprog 14y ago

Did anyone read "http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf http://www.suttonfruit.com/pics/urea_electrolysis.pdf linked within the article. That's a paper that illustrates direct hydrogen production from urine without electricity (a chemical process)! Making the whole idea a little more plausible.

jfc 14y ago

These girls banded together and built something. Whether it's a rousing success or ends up being a bad idea, there is something positive to be said for their efforts. If you consider the cultural context in which they are operating, they deserve praise for this. Heck, we praise people who build failed webapps here in the US, in part because it's an exercise in execution. When people build new things, it's great even if it doesn't work out, because who knows what it could lead to?