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CU develops solar toilet for third world use
Mar 13th
by CU-Boulder ready for India unveiling
A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.
The self-contained, waterless toilet, designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has the capability of heating human waste to a high enough temperature to sterilize human waste and create biochar, a highly porous charcoal, said project principal investigator Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering. The biochar has a one-two punch in that it can be used to both increase crop yields and sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
The project is part of the Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” an effort to develop a next-generation toilet that can be used to disinfect liquid and solid waste while generating useful end products, both in developing and developed nations, said Linden. Since the 2012 grant, Linden and his CU-Boulder team have received an additional $1 million from the Gates Foundation for the project, which includes a team of more than a dozen faculty, research professionals and students, many working full time on the effort.
According to the Gates Foundation, the awards recognize researchers who are developing ways to manage human waste that will help improve the health and lives of people around the world. Unsafe methods to capture and treat human waste result in serious health problems and death – food and water tainted with pathogens from fecal matter results in the deaths of roughly 700,000 children each year.
Linden’s team is one of 16 around the world funded by the Gates “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” since 2011. All have shipped their inventions to Delhi, where they will be on display March 20-22 for scientists, engineers and dignitaries. Other institutional winners of the grants range from Caltech to Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the National University of Singapore.
The CU-Boulder invention consists of eight parabolic mirrors that focus concentrated sunlight to a spot no larger than a postage stamp on a quartz-glass rod connected to eight bundles of fiber-optic cables, each consisting of thousands of intertwined, fused fibers, said Linden. The energy generated by the sun and transferred to the fiber-optic cable system — similar in some ways to a data transmission line — can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material, disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine, and produce char.
“Biochar is a valuable material,” said Linden. “It has good water holding capacity and it can be used in agricultural areas to hold in nutrients and bring more stability to the soils.” A soil mixture containing 10 percent biochar can hold up to 50 percent more water and increase the availability of plant nutrients, he said. Additionally, the biochar can be burned as charcoal and provides energy comparable to that of commercial charcoal.
Linden is working closely with project co-investigators Professor R. Scott Summers of environmental engineering and Professor Alan Weimer chemical and biological engineering and a team of postdoctoral fellows, professionals, graduate students, undergraduates and a high school student.
“We are doing something that has never been done before,” said Linden. “While the idea of concentrating solar energy is not new, transmitting it flexibly to a customizable location via fiber-optic cables is the really unique aspect of this project.” The interdisciplinary project requires chemical engineers for heat transfer and solar energy work, environmental engineers for waste treatment and stabilization, mechanical engineers to build actuators and moving parts and electrical engineers to design control systems, Linden said.
Tests have shown that each of the eight fiber-optic cables can produce between 80 and 90 watts of energy, meaning the whole system can deliver up to 700 watts of energy into the reaction chamber, said Linden. In late December, tests at CU-Boulder showed the solar energy directed into the reaction chamber could easily boil water and effectively carbonize solid waste.
While the current toilet has been created to serve four to six people a day, a larger facility that could serve several households simultaneously is under design with the target of meeting a cost level of five cents a day per user set by the Gates Foundation. “We are continuously looking for ways to improve efficiency and lower costs,” he said.
“The great thing about the Gates Foundation is that they provide all of the teams with the resources they need,” Linden said. “The foundation is not looking for one toilet and one solution from one team. They are nurturing unique ideas and looking at what the individual teams bring overall to the knowledge base.”
Linden, who called the 16 teams a “family of researchers,” said the foundation has funded trips for CU-Boulder team members to collaborate with the other institutions in places like Switzerland, South Africa and North Carolina. “Instead of sink or swim funding, they want every team to succeed. In some ways we are like a small startup company, and it’s unlike any other project I have worked on during my career,” he said.
CU-Boulder team member Elizabeth Travis from Parker, Colo., who is working toward a master’s degree in the engineering college’s Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities, said her interest in water and hygiene made the Reinvent the Toilet project a good fit. “It is a really cool research project and a great team,” she said. “Everyone is very creative, patient and supportive, and there is a lot of innovation. It is exciting to learn from all of the team members.”
“We have a lot of excitement and energy on our team, and the Gates Foundation values that,” Linden said. “It is one thing to do research, another to screw on nuts and bolts and make something that can make a difference. To me, that’s the fun part, and the project is a nice fit for CU-Boulder because we have a high interest in developing countries and expertise in all of the renewable energy technologies as well as sanitation.”
The CU-Boulder team is now applying for phase two of the Gates Foundation Reinvent the Toilet grant to develop a field-worthy system to deploy in a developing country based on their current design, and assess other technologies that may enhance the toilet system, including the use of high-temperature fluids that can collect, retain and deliver heat.
-CU-
CU scientists: New battery extends range and safety of electric-powered vehicles
Sep 22nd
A cutting-edge battery technology developed at the University of Colorado Boulder that could allow tomorrow’s electric vehicles to travel twice as far on a charge is now closer to becoming a commercial reality.
CU’s Technology Transfer Office has completed an agreement with Solid Power LLC—a CU-Boulder spinoff company founded by Se-Hee Lee and Conrad Stoldt, both associate professors of mechanical engineering—for the development and commercialization of an innovative solid-state rechargeable battery. Solid Power also was recently awarded a $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy for the purpose of creating a battery that can improve electric vehicle driving range.
The rechargeable batteries that are standard in today’s electric vehicles—as well as in a host of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops—are lithium-ion batteries, which generate electricity when lithium ions move back and forth between electrodes in a liquid electrolyte solution.
Engineers and chemists have long known that using lithium metal as the anode in a rechargeable battery—as opposed to the conventional carbon materials that are used as the anode in conventional lithium-ion batteries—can dramatically increase its energy density. But using lithium metal, a highly reactive solid, in conjunction with a liquid electrolyte is extremely hazardous because it increases the chance of a thermal runaway reaction that can result in a fire or an explosion.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries require a bulky amount of devices to protect and cool the batteries. A fire onboard a Boeing Dreamliner in January that temporarily grounded the new class of plane was linked to its onboard lithium-ion battery.
Lee and Stoldt solved the safety concerns around using lithium metal by eliminating the liquid electrolyte. Instead, the pair built an entirely solid-state battery that uses a ceramic electrolyte to separate the lithium metal anode from the cathode. Because the solid-state battery is far safer, it requires less protective packaging, which in turn could reduce the weight of the battery system in electric vehicles and help extend their range.
Research into the development of solid-state batteries has gone on for a couple of decades, but it has been difficult to create a solid electrolyte that allowed the ions to pass through it as easily as a liquid electrolyte.
“The problem has always been that solid electrolytes had very poor performance making their use in rechargeable batteries impractical,” Stoldt said. “However, the last decade has seen a resurgence in the development of new solid electrolytes with ionic conductivities that rival their liquid counterparts.”
The critical innovation added by Lee and Stoldt that allows their solid-state lithium battery to out-perform standard lithium-ion batteries is the construction of the cathode, the part of the battery that attracts the positively charged lithium ions once they’re discharged from the lithium metal. Instead of using a solid mass of material, Lee and Stoldt created a “composite cathode,” essentially small particles of cathode material held together with solid electrolyte and infused with an additive that increases its electrical conductivity. This configuration allows ions and electrons to move more easily within the cathode.
“The real innovation is an all-solid composite cathode that is based upon an iron-sulfur chemistry that we developed at CU,” Stoldt said. “This new, low-cost chemistry has a capacity that’s nearly 10 times greater than state-of-the-art cathodes.”
Last year, Lee and Stoldt partnered with Douglas Campbell, a small-business and early-stage product development veteran, to spin out Solid Power.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to achieve commercial success for the all solid-state rechargeable battery,” said Campbell, Solid Power’s president. “We’re actively engaging industrial commercial partners to assist in commercialization and expect to have prototype products ready for in-field testing within 18 to 24 months.” Important to the early success of the company has been its incubation within CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science’s applied energy storage research center, a part of the college’s energy systems and environmental sustainability initiative.
Solid Power is a member of Rocky Mountain Innosphere, a nonprofit technology incubator headquartered in Fort Collins, Colo., with a mission to accelerate the development and success of high-impact scientific and technology startup companies.
“We’re very excited to be working with Solid Power’s team to get them to the next level,” said Mike Freeman, Innosphere’s CEO. “This is a big deal to Colorado’s clean-tech space. Solid Power’s batteries will have a huge impact in the EV market, and they have a potential $20 billion market for their technology.”
Learn more about Solid Power at http://www.solidpowerbattery.com.
-CU-
Boulder New Tech Meetup hosts 2 days of Techstars
Aug 3rd
- Happy Birthday New Tech – 7 years ago this month 40+ people got together at the Me.dium offices on Pearl street in Boulder.
- Membership is now 9,614
- We’ve had 141 New Tech meetings
- We host 3 meetings a month (Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins)
- Over 700 companies are mapped at bdnt.org (if you’re not on the map, shame on you, go do it now)
- We help 100’s of companies find employees up and down the front range
- Wish yourself a Happy Birthday fellow New Tech member, you are AMAZING.
- August in Boulder means TechStars and we have 2 nights of presentations. August 5 and 6. Monday the 5th is oversold, but Tuesday the 6th has a few open seats. (http://bdnt.org)
- September 16-21 is Denver Startup Week ( a celebration of all things startup) and New Tech has decided to blow it up and I mean blow itttttttt up. Stay tuned as our New Tech hosts plan the biggest New Tech Ever and celebrate, shall i say it, 10,000 members.
- We get tons of requests from the community every month, but these 3 always outnumber the rest:
- How do I present my company (fill out this form)
- Do you know where i can find a full time developer/designer/admin/BD/sales (http://bdnt.org/hiring)
- Do you know where I can find a freelance developer/designer (I am so excited to announce our Freelancer Availability Search Engine, stay tuned and constantly refresh your browser at http://bdnt.org for more details….)
Job highlights from the job board (to see more jobs: http://bdnt.org/hiring):
- Web Stack Hacker
- Data Science Engineer
- Front-End Engineer & Craftsman
- A hitchhikers Guide to Boulder
- Boulder Startup Center
- Startup Colorado
Blog of the month
http://www.siliconflatirons.com/
We love our sponsors: thank you
SpotXchange (http://www.spotxchange.com/spx_about_careers.html)
With more than 400 million auctions per day, SpotXchange is the largest global marketplace of video ad inventory reaching 120 million unique visitors in more than 50 countries each month. The leading platform for programmatic buying and selling of digital video, SpotXchange connects thousands of publishers with advertisers, agencies, trading desks, DSPs and ad networks, running top brand campaigns through its IAB-certified marketplace. SpotXchange shows premium publishers and more than 1,000 world class advertisers that there is a better way to buy and sell digital video — with solutions that guarantee total transparency, brand safety and real-time control in either a private or public marketplace.
AlchemyAPI (http://www.alchemyapi.com)
The product of over 50 person years of engineering effort, AlchemyAPI is a cloud-based text mining platform providing the most comprehensive set of semantic analysis capabilities in the natural language processing field. Used over 3 billion times per month by 23,000+ developers, AlchemyAPI enables customers to perform large-scale social media monitoring, target advertisements more effectively, track influencers and sentiment within the media, automate content aggregation and recommendation, make more accurate stock trading decisions, enhance business and government intelligence systems, and create smarter applications and services.
Technical Integrity (http://technicalintegrity.com/)
We’ve created a better way to help employers and highly skilled technologists connect. It involves critical elements that so many people forget: a focus on a two-way cultural matching for both our clients and candidates, as well as engaging with and giving back to the community. This is part of our DNA, and as a result we’ve changed the way technical placements are done. We are highly selective and only work with the most interesting and well-respected startups and mid-size employers in Boulder, Denver, and around the nation. These are companies who treat their employees with respect, have fun, and understand that valued employees = happy employees . We also take pride in representing only the best Engineers and Executives. We emphasize quality, honesty, and integrity in everything we do. Over the past two years we have given back more than $20,000 to charities and non-profits in Boulder and beyond as we believe it’s the right thing to do. We are proud to be sponsoring Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. Additionally, over the past few years we’ve helped our community bring together like-minded folks regularly at Ignite Boulder and BoulderBeta and various Women in Technology groups, to name a few. Please drop us a line to say hello and let us know how we can be of assistance to you or your organization.
Silicon Flatirons (http://www.silicon-flatirons.org)
CU-Boulder’s Silicon Flatirons Center is a donor-supported entity which helps connect the fabric of the Front Range’s software, Internet, and telecom entrepreneurship scene. SFC’s objective is to help catalyze startups by connecting CU to the Mile High Tech emerging company community. In addition to the Meetup, SFC’s Entrepreneurship Initiative includes the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, Crash Courses on entrepreneurship, and our annual March entrepreneurship conference. SFC additionally works closely with partners across the CU campus to present the New Venture Challenge. SFC is delighted to serve as a Meetup sponsor since 2007.
Mode Set (http://www.modeset.com)
More than just developers, we want to understand your business model, your risks, blockers, opportunities, and market advantages. We’re here to build you a viable, releasable product you can take to customers, investors, and stakeholders. Whether that product is a web application, mobile application or social application, or purely architecture, infrastructure or optimization, we can help. We bring with us extensive knowledge and years of experience working with clients ranging from early-stage startups to large global brands.
SOURCE : Robert Reich