THE GIST
* Old computer parts serve as a reservoir to cultivate algae.
* The algae can be used to make biodiesel.
* If just 6.5 percent of Americans had one, we could replace petroleum with biodiesel.
When you think of recycling electronics, no doubt you imagine the old PC or mobile phone being disassembled, and it’s metal and plastic parts melted down to be repurposed. But for some people, it means reusing the parts to grow algae.
Students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created Bio-Grow, a device made from various computer parts that serves as a reservoir to cultivate algae.
The algae can then be used in biodiesel production, which could potentially replace petroleum in the futures.
“If someone had one of these in their homes, they would cultivate algae and extract it,” said team member and undergraduate student Megan Kenney. “Then they could take it into a gas company that was set up with an oil filtration facility and get credit off their gas.”
Kenney, along with undergraduate students Timothy Harvey, Elliot Reese and Mark Schnitzer, and graduate student Saeidreza Shiftehfar was focused on finding a way to be green, and ended up winning second place in the International Electronic Waste Competition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with their design.
“The whole point of our project was two different concepts,” Schnitzer said. “To use electronic waste and to solve a green issue in the world.”
Which is why the team chose to use old electronics to build the device called an algae bioreactor. It encourages photosynthesis, the chemical reaction that happens in plants, which uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugar.
“By using e-waste, you are giving a second life to all these electronics,” Kenney said.
The algae-growing tank was made from the side panels of an Apple G4 CPU tower, with PVC pipes and acrylic panels for structural support. The team used an Apple iMac CRT to emit the light and heat the algae needs to grow. The entire structure had to be sealed and housed within an outer cowell made of high-density foam, which provides stability as well as insulation.
A modified Dell Latitude CPX laptop was programmed to monitor and control the iMac CRT so that it would turn on a specific light spectrum at different intervals of time and adjust the temperature within the tank.
“Algae’s best growth factors are within the red and blue spectrums of light at a ratio of four to one,” Kenney said. “We also knew that it needed to be 62 to 82 degrees.”
The tank also has a water pump, which aerates the algae and provides it with the maximum exposure to sunlight. A faucet allows the user to extract the algae.
The process of creating biofuel from algae is complex and expensive and to date remains in research labs. But the team hopes this project will bring biofuel down to the household level, which would drive up production and lower costs.
“We are imagining this product will eventually become part of a larger system,” Harvey said. “You won’t just have it in your house, you would take the algae to a biomass collection point, at which point it would be transported to a refinery.”
The refinery would then extract the lipids from the algae, which is up to 50 percent of the algae’s components to create biodiesel. The byproducts can be used for feedstock, fertilizer and high-end pharmaceuticals because algae is so rich in protein and nutrients.
The teams’ calculations showed that if just 6.5 percent of Americans had one of these in their homes, it could generate the amount of algae needed to replace petroleum with biodiesel.
And algae growers would make money, too. Kenney said the algae could be sold for a dollar a gallon, and because algae grows so fast, it could be harvested every three days.
If this device becomes commonplace like the team is hoping, perhaps the vases that adorn end tables in homes across the nation will be replaced by an algae-growing tank which could produce gas for the cars of the future.
Specific link: http://news.discovery.com/tech/electronic-waste-grows-algae.html
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