Video: African Generator Powered by Sugar and Yeast
AfriGadget has more on Dr. Cedrick Ngalande's simple generator that is powered by a reaction of sugar and yeast that causes a see-saw motion from which electricity can be harvested. It looks slow in the video (and it is), but the motion moves back and forth for "many hours," which should be enough to generate power for cell phones and low-power PCs.
My first thought was obvious: Dr. Ngalande has developed a way to harvest power from the production of beer.
Dr. Ngalande’s Sugar and Yeast Power Generator [AfriGadget]
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Now I have a use for the three-halloweens-ago candy that is sitting in a basket on top of my refrigerator. Brilliant!
What? Africans can be generated using sugar and yeast? This throws my whole view of the origin of man out of whack.
I'm gonna to need a minute.
and then the beer can be burned for more electricity!
@TumblingWall: Either you were trying to be random, or you were thinking what I just realized. Forget making beer, make ethanol (which is basically moonshine). Right now, ethanol appears to be a bad investment, energywise, but maybe if it were to ferment in this type of gizmo, the energy produced from that could help even it out. If it doesn't make things work out for corn, that's okay, as sugar cane ethanol in Brazil has been successful on the economic and ecological level, so it could work with fermenting sugar to recoup even more energy.
For even more energy collection, the bottles will contain pressurized CO2 by the time the machine is done. If the CO2 is bubbled up through an algae farm, then that makes even more fermentable mass while sequestering the CO2.
I'm not surprised just a little electricity comes from two bottles. What would interest me is how it would work with two really huge vessels of fermenting stuff. I wonder how much electricity a standard ethanol plant could turn out in a day...
What I don't get is how exactly it works. Has this guy gotten a patent or put up diagrams anywhere? Would the machine run until the yeast had completely fermented to the desired point, or would it stop before that? And does the sealed nature of the device make the environment inside the bottles anaerobic, cutting the reaction short, or do the "special valves" let in fresh air at any point? I do understand the basic mechanism from looking at the jpegs, though.
It looks like it might work well with vinegar and baking soda, too, as a quicker way of operating and a proof of concept. Probably not energy effective, but it would be great for a science fair, if I were still young enough to participate.
this must be the most boring video ever.