Making waste into fuel

Physorg.com:

“Atmospheric pressure plasma-enhanced soft hydrolysis” invented by students as North Carolina State University.

Waste materials from hog lagoons, fed into Orbit’s high solids anaerobic digester, produce a ratio of 67 percent methane to 33 percent carbon dioxide, which turns out to be the ideal ratio for making methanol from AP plasma. “We are in our second design of the system,” said W. Patrick Davis, doctoral student in materials science and engineering. “We know how much methane and carbon dioxide we are putting in. We soon will be able to calculate our efficiency in terms of how much we are converting into methanol.” With the help of Dr. H. Henry Lamb, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, the team will have the ability to identify each chemical produced by this process.

“The key here,” said Christopher J. Oldham, doctoral student in materials science, “is that, as a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more harmful to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and people don’t really talk about that. We’re taking that methane and making valuable alcohols and chemicals.”

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