Innovative Ideas and Gadgets from Local Scientists and Inventors

Turning Poop into Power

Ian Gates (left) and Michael Kallos.

In one single leap of technological design, two scientists from the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering aim to bring electricity to the 1.4 billion people in the world living in the dark, while also providing a safe place to poop for another 2.6 billion. Believe it or not, both of these problems can be put to rest by building a better toilet. 

Last April, Ian Gates and Michael Kallos were awarded a prestigious Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant of US$100,000 to design a prototype of a toilet that will turn human excrement and food scraps into electricity and fertilizer. Right now, their grant covers the construction of a single prototype, but, if their design proves to be a hit, it could balloon into a $1-million grant. That would fund a manufacturing facility and a pilot project in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh to mass-produce their design.

With this project, the two chemical engineers hope to create an affordable solution to fecal water contamination in the rural areas of Southern Asia, where fecal-oral contamination has killed as many as 1.5 million children due to sewage from non-sewered outhouses leaking into the water supply.

The porta-potty-like toilets they plan to build will solve this problem by providing sanitary containment for a five- to seven-person family, while also using the family’s excrement to produce power. Within a few weeks, the decomposing waste of a family can produce enough methane gas to run 10 60-watt light bulbs for eight hours a day, which is enough power to recharge a cellphone or have the lights on in the evening so a family member can study to get a better education. Every four weeks, families can also empty out the solid materials from the toilet and use what was once a biohazard as a fertilizer for their crops.

To turn poop into power, Gates and Kallos are using a thermoelectric generator, which is a device that turns heat into electricity. By burning methane gas from the decomposing waste, they plan to heat a metal composite plate inside the generator that will start the flow of electricity. 

The advantage of the thermoelectric generator is that it has no moving parts, and fewer moving parts ensures less maintenance. In countries often ravaged by famine and natural disaster, low maintenance is key to ensuring their toilets don’t get salvaged for scrap that’s used for something else. 

“The biggest problem with a lot of technologies is that we invent them and then we say, ‘Let’s export it to Pakistan and Bangladesh,’” says Gates. “What do they do? They look at it and say, ‘That’s great,’ then they dismantle it to get the pipes.” 

By stressing a solution that is cheap, easy to fix and seen as valuable to the local population, Gates and Kallos plan to beat out other competing technologies aimed at solving the same problem. “There’s a group in Britain that’s building a toilet that looks like it should be on the Space Shuttle; it’s incredible,” says Gates. “It’s a beautiful piece of art, but will someone in Bangladesh adopt it? I don’t think so.”

Mapping the Digital Frontier

When the Internet was in its infancy, browsing was like blindly stumbling from one link to another, until search engines like Google came along and allowed us to find whatever popped into our heads. 

Now, another evolution in Internet navigation is on its way, one that will that turn massive amounts of information into cool-looking maps and infographics we can browse through in new and improved ways. 

According to U of C researcher Marian Dörk, within five years we’ll be able to navigate our e-mail, Twitter and Facebook accounts through map-like interpretations of abstract information. For example, using Dörk’s searching software, which he calls Edgemaps, you could see the connections between philosophers, painters and musicians by looking at a spiderweb-like graphic that outlines their influences on one another. 

“The big difference between browsing the web and visual exploration is that, with browsing, each hyperlink is like going from one room to the next through an endless opening of doors,” Dörk says. “With visualizations, it’s more of a bird’s-eye perspective.” 

Indeed, the typical web browsing done today is limited in that it’s only possible to go from page to page through hyperlinks and searches. But by using one of Dörk’s maps, relationships between information can be seen and explored. For example, if a philosophy student is studying for a test and wants to know the dates of birth, interests and influences of a number of philosophers, this information is available all at once by interacting with one of Dörk’s infographics, rather than clicking through each philosopher’s page on Wikipedia and hunting down the info. 

In fact, with Dörk’s system, each philosopher’s relationship to one another can be seen through a map that groups philosophers with similar interests and ideas through proximity and colour coding. For example, socialist Karl Marx and Communist Manifesto co-author Frederic Engels would be right next to each other and coloured a reddish hue, indicating their ideas are similar. 

Each of Dörk’s maps are interactive, as well. Clicking on Marx would bring forth a fireworks-like explosion of lines by his name, with each line indicating a form of directional influence. A curved arrow away from Marx to existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre indicates Marx’s influence on Sartre’s writing, while an arrow toward Marx from capitalism’s creator, Adam Smith, represents Smith’s influence on Marx. 

The power of this form of organization is being able to see previously separate bits of information together. According to Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, establishing novel connections between disparate areas of information is how innovation happens, and these types of insights can be triggered by Dörk’s interactive maps.

But for those of us who aren’t on the cusp of innovation, Dörk’s maps could also be used to browse online music collections like iTunes. If you’re looking for music that is similar to one of your favourite bands, Dörk’s system lets you browse through the influences of that favourite band, allowing you to see and hear new music that is more likely to fit your taste.

Dörk’s prototypes are not ready yet for mass use like what we’re used to seeing with Google, but he thinks that very soon we’re going to see these forms of organization emerging on a smaller scale where there is less information to connect, like in our personal e-mails, or our Twitter accounts. 

“This is happening, but we’re only at the beginning,” he says. “If we actually want to scale this beyond your own little Twitter stream to large information spaces like the whole of Wikipedia, or the whole web, then there are still huge challenges ahead, which will push this technology to five to 10 years.” 

So whether you’re looking to load up fresh tunes on your iPod, trying to grasp the general concepts of a tough course or seeking inspiration for your next innovation, some version of Dörk’s digital infographics will make life easier in the near future.

Eco-friendly Oil

Alberta’s known crude oil reserve, all 175 billion barrels of it, is the third largest in the world next to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, but today we’re only scraping the surface of those riches, literally. 

The bulk of Alberta’s oil production to date is dependent on the low-hanging fruit, the sticky oil sands close to the surface that can be dug up through surface mining. But more than 80 per cent of our total reserve is buried deep within the Earth, so it is inevitable that we’ll soon have to resort to more expensive in situ methods to pump the bitumen out of the ground. In situ projects extract oil from deep underground by using steam to liquefy and separate the heavy bitumen trapped in sand and clay sedimentary deposits, so it can be pumped out by pipes placed underneath the well.

There’s a problem though, says Pedro Pereira-Almao, director of the In Situ Energy Centre at the Schulich School of Engineering, and it’s that today’s in situ technologies need to become more environmentally and economically efficient. Thankfully, the process that he’s working on should be able to increase the quality of the pumped out oil while using less water, burning half as much natural gas (which is used to heat the water and turn it into steam), and reducing greenhouse gases by 75 per cent compared to current in situ methods like cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) and steam assisted gravity drainage (SAG-D). 

In CSS and SAG-D, a dizzying network of pipes the size of a one or two townships is buried under the ground in order to inject hot steam into a well. The steam softens the bitumen so it can be pumped out of the wells and sent to upgraders on the surface where more steam is used to lighten the thick bitumen by a factor of 1,000, turning it into light synthetic crude oil. Once stripped of the unwanted sulfur, nitrogen and heavy metals, the synthetic crude is then light enough to be pipelined to distant refineries where it is purified further into gasoline and oil for your car.

Pedro-Almao’s process will streamline this process by upgrading the bitumen to synthetic crude inside the well, eliminating the need for water-hungry, emission-belching upgraders on the surface. “We’re developing a system in which we won’t need upgraders at the surface,” says Pereira-Almao. “We could in principle — based on our bench experiments — upgrade the oil in the reservoir up to a medium quality synthetic oil.

In Pereira-Almao’s process, known as hot fluid injection, a nano-sized catalyst — a chemical cocktail of metals and minerals in particles the size of a virus — is added to a well. This nanocatalyst reacts with the thick oil in the underground well, causing the unwanted sand and minerals to separate from the oil and sink to the bottom. The producers can then pump out the higher-quality oil that sits on the surface, as if they were sucking off the top layer with a straw. That oil is then light enough to be piped to a refinery without the need for surface upgrading.

“You leave in the reservoir what you don’t want to take to the surface,” says Pereira-Almao. “If it’s all done in one stage and in one place, we can save a lot of money and it would be much better for the environment.” 

Pereira-Almao is working on a prototype that will be ready in four years. Once his prototype is proven in the field, commercial use should follow within the decade. And while it’s impossible to know when widespread distribution will occur, Pereira-Almao is confident that high oil prices and rising environmental awareness will hasten its adoption. “Just because it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean you’re going to discard an idea that could produce societal and economic benefits that could totally change the ball game,” he says.