Cows, as many people know, have four
stomachs. Cows also generate lots of methane.
So, if your goal is to describe a machine that turns food waste and
cardboard into methane gas, the bovine digestive system is an analogy that
makes some sense.
“Our reactor is some ways a two-stomach
cow,” says Jorge Gonzalez-Estrella, a post-doctoral research associate in the
Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Mines.
Gonzalez-Estrella is one of the researchers
working on the Gas Cube project. The
semi-trailer-sized reactor is much larger than a cow, but it’s still portable. It’s
one of the projects in development at Mines aimed at turning a range of remote
base waste into energy. This is all thanks to a $4.8 million grant from the
United States Air Force, $1.2 million of which funds the Gas Cube. A remote Air Force Base can produce lots of
waste. The Air Force seeks to save waste handling and fuel costs at
mission-based remote bases. This is a challenge that the Gas Cube is designed
to overcome.
How does it work? Back to the cow analogy. At the Gas Cube’s input,
or mouth, a shredder grinds up the solid cardboard or food waste and deposits it
in chamber number one. This is sort of like a cow chewing and swallowing its
food. Then in that first chamber, or stomach number one, hydrolytic microorganisms break down the mix of
food waste and cardboard into sugars, and fermenting microbes then break up
those su...