Blog

ENVISIONING SUSTAINABILITY
By T.H. Culhane, Ph.D.
Director, Climate Change Mitigation and AdaptationUSF Patel College of Global Sustainability
Co-founder and director, Solar CITIES Inc.

November 25 2018

Photo: An early virtual reality interactive game version of Rosebud Sustainability Education Center  in development showing Puxin biodigesters placed in the landscape with a playable avatar.

Creating a biodigester is one of the best STEM/STEAM Science Education Activities any teacher could hope for, and making your own Solar CITIES 5 gallon water jug digester is something every kid can do!

Food waste makes no sense:
Intrigo for Module TwXLT: Kinds of Wastes I, Food and organic wastes

By T.H. Culhane, Ph.D.

Legacy issues from the time when most people assumed biodigesters were a rural technology best fed with animal manures still plague digester design and operation.
A case in point is the current design of the simplified 10m3 Chinese "Puxin" digester.
Plans for the digester, which is increasingly used in urban and suburban areas where food waste is the most available and preferred feedstock,  still call for a vertical feedpipe, despite the fact that food wastes are usually very buoyant and have a hard time going down the "throat" of the domestic dragon.

 Update on Jordan Project

In January of 2017, after extensive team and relationship building in preparation for the initiative, Solar CITIES president T.H. Culhane and graduate student Enas AbdelRahman left the Arava Institute of the Environment, where they were working on a biogas refrigeration project, by bus, traveling overland to Jericho to make the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge crossing from Israel to Jordan.  They made the trip using Culhane’s personal money.

Social Acceptance of BioGas Technology within the Palestinian Community in the West-Bank

Enas Abdelrahman
Methodology and Research Seminar, AIES Fall 2016
Supervisors: Dr. Thomas H Culhane, Dr. Tareq Abu-Hamed and Suleiman Halasah