The project is all about generating electricity
from waste material. In other words, turning
waste into something really, really useful.
And the microbial fuel cell technology is
something that does exactly that. It takes
the waste that we naturally produce and it
converts it directly into electricity.
At the moment, we are at the stage where we
have powered a number of electronic devices
as stand-alone demonstrations. And we've got
to the point that we can now power a mobile
phone -- a normal mobile phone.
The microbial fuel cell is an energy converter,
if I can put into simple terms -- it takes
one form of energy and it converts it to something
different.
So inside the microbial fuel cell, we've got
live organisms, live bugs -- the same bugs
that we will find in sediment, in soil, even
in our gut for digestion -- and those little
organisms inside the microbial fuel cell,
they eat the fuel that we give them. And by
eating it, breaking it down, they produce
electrons which are the electricity that we
see at the output of the microbial fuel cell.
Urine is exceptionally good as a fuel for
those microorganisms.
What you see here is a bottle which is half-full
with real human urine. The urine is pumped
-- you can see the tube going through this
multi-channel polystatic pump -- and it's
pumped into the top floor of this cascade
of microbial fuel cell.
Each one of these cylinders is an individual
microbial fuel cell. The urine enters the
first one from the top, and it runs through
along the cylinder all the way through, comes
out here, and it goes through the second stage
of the cascade system of the microbial fuel
cell.
It gets processed, it gets eaten up by the
organisms inside the microbial fuel cell,
comes out the back and enters the final stage
of the cascade. It gets further processed
by the organism inside the third microbial
fuel cell and then the waste comes out in
this collection bottle here.
And this is a repeated stage. So we've got
three more stages that are connected like
batteries -- if you like -- all collectively
producing enough energy to be able to turn
on to power this mobile phone.
The work that we've been doing over the years
has been funded by the UK Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council -- EPSRC
-- also by the UK Technology Strategy Board
and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The urine work, in particular, has been the
main focus of the EPSRC Fellowship, also the
Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations
Grant that we've had that's primarily interested
in developing these for the developing world.
