Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Houston we have a problem

So I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I'd like this to run. I was able to setup the pump onto my reactor however I keep getting air pockets throughout my tube assembly and am trying to figure out the best way to fix this. Whether it mean I change my pump assembly around or figure out another plan of action. Water is currently being pumped from the bucket below into the right side of the assembly and then gravity fed back into the bucket from the left side. Below is a current picture of my setup.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Carbon Neutral Energy

I wanted to find out exactly how much CO2 was in the atmosphere as these numbers would be used in the development of a global energy policy change.
  • Air pressure at sea level is about 14.5 lbs. / sq. in. or 10 metric tons / sq. m.
  • Earth's radius is 5,925km and therefore the surface area of Earth is 441 million sq. km or 441,000 billion sq. m.
Therefore the weight of the Earth's atmosphere is about 4.41 million billion metric tons.

Earth System Research Laboratory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii has stated that the atmosopheric CO2 concentration has increased by 2.02 ppm from last year. 2.02 ppm can also be expressed at 2.02 mg/kg of atmosphere or 0.000202% of the total atmospheric weight.

Therefore the weight of CO2 that was added to our atmosphere last year was 8,908,200,000 metric tons.
  • CO2 weighs about 3.67x as much as carbon or carbon is 27.3% of the total weight of CO2
Therefore, of the CO2 in the atmosphere, 2,431,938,600 metric tons of it is strictly carbon which is what we are interested in.

Vegetable oils on average have a carbon chain length of about 18 carbons with 1 double bond. This would give us a chemical equation of C18H34O2 with carbon making up 76.54% of the overall weight of the vegetable oil. This means we will need to create 1.31 metric tons of oil for each ton of carbon absorbed.

This means we would need to create 3,177,395,568 metric tons of oil to absorb the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere last year.
Each mL of vegetable oil weighs about 0.92g; taken from the Spectrum - Chemical, Safety and Laboratory Products Catalog.

Therefore the weight of oil we now have would take up about 2,923,203,923,000 liters of volume. That's almost 3 trillion liters of vegetable oil.
This would also be expressed as 772,228,780,000 gallons or 18,386,399,500 barrels of oil.
Current algae production numbers suggest that oil can be harvested at about 36,000 gallons per acre per year.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?
With are current technological breakthroughs in algae biotechnology, we would need to create 21,450,799 acres worth of algae farms in order to sequester the carbon the world releases to the atmosphere in the form of CO2. This is a little bit larger than the area of South Carolina. If each country were to build farms on their land based on their contribution to the CO2 increase, the United States would be building farms that would be about the size of New Jersey. As technology improves, the amount of oil harvested per acre should increase and these areas of use should come down. However this just shows how much of an impact we as humans have on our environment.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

PhotoBioReactor Step 1

I've been planning a closed-loop photobioreactor in Google SketchUp for a few months now and have finally decided to get off my butt and start bringing it to life. I'm doing a benchtop scale version first for a few reasons:
1) Make sure it works before spending more on a larger version.
2) Easier to take pictures of.
3) I can build it by myself in about a weekend

You can check out the SketchUp file at Google's 3D warehouse HERE.

The reactor will be built in three parts: the photo-collector section, the sump section, and the electronics/light focuser.

I just finished building the photo-collector section tonight. It took me about 5 hours today. My circular saw wasn't working so everything had to be cut by hand. Lets just say I got my workout today. :-P I will hopefully be posting a tutorial once I finish.

Here's a picture of what I have done at the moment.