When
a South Dakota Mines research team announced in March that it had successfully
generated power with tomato waste, the world and international media elite immediately
took notice. After all, it’s not every day that you hear about fruit being
converted into electricity.
The
research group led by Dr. Venkata Gadhamshetty, Mines graduate students and a
researcher each from Princeton University and Florida Gulf Coast University
announced findings at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the
American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Diego
Within
hours, Dr. Gadhamshetty was interviewing with the BBC, and the news was written
about by CNN, Newsweek, MSN, Yahoo news and the Times of India (to name a few),
highlighting just one example of the important, world-changing research being
conducted at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City.
The pilot project involves a
biological-based fuel cell that uses tomato waste from harvests, grocery store
shelves and production plants such as ketchup factories. The inherent
characteristics of the decomposing leftovers make it a perfect fuel source for
enhancing electrochemical reactions, Dr. Gadhamshetty says.
Researchers designed and built a
new electrochemical device to test and extract electrons from the defective
tomatoes. The power output from their mini reactor is small: 10 milligrams of
tomato waste resulted in 0.3 watts of electricity. But Dr. Gadhamshetty notes
that with a scaled-up device and continued research, electrical output could be
increased by several orders of magnitude.
Their success paves the way for an
efficient low-cost new alternative energy source. “It might be possible to one
day put this device at the bottom of my kitchen sink” to convert waste into
household electricity, Dr. Gadhamshetty notes.
The project is especially important
to Florida, where tomatoes are a key crop and 396,000 tons in discarded
tomatoes are generated each year. Dr. Gadhamshetty’s team calculates there is
theoretically enough tomato waste in Florida each year to meet Disney World’s
electricity demand for 90 days using an optimized biological fuel cell.
The recent attention is not the
first time Dr. Gadhamshetty has been recognized for his innovated research. In
2015 he received the prestigious CAREER award by the National Science
Foundation. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of
teacher-scholars by integrating outstanding research and excellent education
and carries a $500,000 research grant. This spring he was honored with South
Dakota Mines’ Outstanding Faculty Research Award.
He is also currently researching
the next generation of minimally invasive, corrosion-resistant coatings to help
combat microbial-caused corrosion in water and oil pipelines, sprinklers, boat
hulls, medical appliances and more. His research uses graphene as a protectant
to address what is estimated to be a nearly $1 billion infrastructure in the
United States alone.
Watch Dr. Gadhamshetty and his grad
student Namita Shrestha explain their tomato research at a news conference
hosted by the American Chemical Society. YouTube link