At the end of our service learning trip to the Dominican Republic Envisaj Mercy students and Solar CITIES co-founder T.H. Culhane introduced the IBC/ARTI hybrid system to the Batey Relief Alliance Center for AgroPecuaria.
Simon, the grandfather of Google Science Fair/Scientific American Science in Action prize winner Sakhiwe Songhe, lives on a farm in Swaziland outside Manzini where he has fruit orchards and keeps cattle, geese, and chickens. It is here that Sakhiwe and Bonkhe are conducting this year's follow up to their hydroponics experiments, showing the farming community that you can acheive at least twice the yield on Swaziland's poor land using compost to build soil.
August 19 2014 saw Dr. T.H. Culhane and Google Science Fair Finalist Rohit Fenn (an Indian youth who designed a more efficient toilet) and his older brother, evolutionary biologist Amit Fenn, travelling to Swaziland to work with Science in Action winners Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela, adding the 'food waste to fuel and fertilizer' biogas solution to their toolkit for improved low cost hydroponics in Swaziland.
Our second small scale biogas build in Turkey following the one I did the previous year at the same time with Yaşat Hacıbaloğlu -- the network of biogas investigating youth grows ever stronger and brighter -- things have been stalled here in the DIY realm because youtube is banned by the government so it isn't easy to access open source video instruction, but there is no substitute for face-to-face workshops anyway, so I am privileged to have been able to share a solution with the students of Koc University's Environmental Engineering Club this afternoon/evening.
We built this Solar CITIES IBC/ARTI Hybrid Biodigester system on January 15th at Kibbutz Lotan after Culhane field tested the new design early in the fall at Mercy College. The new idea was to use buckets for the feed in and slurry out, simulating a Puxin or fixed dome digester using water displacement to allow for some gas build up in the IBC and creating water pressure to force the gas out. It also gives an ability to easily pour food waste in, acting as a "mega funnel".
[[{"fid":"535","view_mode":"content_medium","fields":{"format":"content_medium","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"The garden of biogas delights -- three buried ARTIs, one Solar CITIES IBC as primary digester and a three oil drum horizontal digester were experimented with at this park in Chyulu Hills National Park"},"type":"media","link_text":null,"attributes":{"title":"The garden of biogas delights -- three buried ARTIs, one Solar CITIES IBC as primary digester and a three oil drum horizontal digester were experimented with at this p
A modified Solar CITIES digestor using HDPE reactor with solar heat exchanger as reactor and 55 gallon drum telescoping gas collectors. Starter material is elephant dung and manure from 27 other species of animal from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, courtesy of horticulturist David Selk and Dan Corum a.ka. "Dr. Doo"
It was here at the Sekem farm and science school outside of Cairo Egypt that Thomas Culhane, Hanna Fathy and Solar CITIES intern Mike Rimoin deployed their invention of the open-source solar heated 3 IBC Solar CITIES Biodigester, perhaps the first use of IBCs for biogas in the world. Culhane felt it necessary to build a biogas system out of IBCs because he had just won a National Geographic Emerging Explorer's Blackstone Ranch Innovation Challenge Grant with Dr.