Once it's filled with water from the tap, he takes a sip from the jar...Bill feigns surprise because five minutes ago, the water was human waste pumped in from a local sewage facility. It was transformed into clean water by what's called the OmniProcessor, a new kind of low-cost waste treatment plant funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ...can transform global sanitation. Using an innovative blend of steam power and water filtration, according to Gates and his foundation, this plant can convert up to 14 tons of sewage into potable water and electricity each day...
The potential benefits are enormous. Forty percent of the global population---or 2.5 billion urban residents---practice open defecation or otherwise lack adequate sanitation, and an additional 2.1 billion urban residents use facilities that do not safely dispose of human waste...It's about the size of two school buses placed side by side. A steel blue staircase runs along one side, and a kind of conveyor belt feeds raw sewage into a drum...the OmniProcessor is really three things: a steam power plant, an incinerator, and a water filtration system...The trick is that these three things feed off each other...The first thing I did was work out the thermodynamics...looking at the energy, and was pleasantly surprised early on that it looked like this could work...A steam engine generates heat for a dryer, which accepts the raw sewage and dries it out. Then the sludge is boiled, and this separates the solids from the water. The incinerator then burns the dried-out solids, producing a high-temperature, high-pressure steam that helps drive the steam engine and, through a generator, makes electricity that can power the OmniProcessor...At the same time, water vapor produced by the sludge dryer travels through a cyclone to spin out any entrained particles, and then other filters---a coarse filter and a fine half-micron membrane filter that resembles Goretex fabric---remove additional substances. A condenser then turns the vapor back into water, which is aerated and passes through multiple activated charcoal filters.
No comments:
Post a Comment