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Department of Chemical Engineering, URI
URI students build microbial fuel cell to generate electricity, reuse waste from biodiesel process
Media Contact: Todd McLeish, 401-874-2116
KINGSTON, R.I. – September 14, 2009 – Two University of Rhode Island students spent the summer building a unique fuel cell that uses bacteria and the waste stream from the production of biodiesel to generate renewable energy.Chemical engineering students Sarah Hanselman of Bangor, Maine, and Patricia Coutts of Hyde Park, N.Y., collaborated with Professor Stanley Barnett to develop this new form of green energy.
According to the students, there is a growing need to convert the waste stream from the process of making biodiesel – 90 percent of which is glycerol – into other valuable products. So they built a small fuel cell using the biodiesel waste products as the fuel. When they added bacteria to the biodiesel waste, the microorganism oxidized the fuel through an electrode to generate electricity.
“In addition to making electricity, we hope that the fuel cell will convert the glycerol into other potentially valuable chemical products that can be used in all sorts of chemical processes and consumer products like shampoo and make-up,” said Hanselman. “If it can work on a larger scale, this could be a win-win situation – it gets rid of biodiesel waste and we get electricity out of it.”
The first microbial fuel cell the students built was not efficient enough to generate useful quantities of electricity. They are continuing to make refinements to the design and materials to decrease internal resistance and increase voltage.
“We’re also exploring using different types of electrodes and different alloys of metals to see which might help us get more voltage,” Coutts said.
The students hope that their fuel cell will eventually generate enough electricity to power a small fan or other household appliance.
Barnett, the students’ advisor, is encouraging the students to pursue other research projects to develop unique renewable energy sources as a means of reducing the use of fossil fuels. One such project involves extracting a naturally produced oil from algae.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to use that oil in a fuel cell,” Coutts said. “It would be awesome if a household could grow their own algae, put it in a fuel cell and get energy to power their appliances. Algae grows fast, it can be grown in ponds almost anywhere, and it would get us away from the costly biodiesel production and separation process.”
Coutts and Hanselman are both enrolled in the URI International Engineering Program and will be spending part of the next year studying and working abroad. Coutts will study at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, followed – she hopes – by an internship at Schott AG, a glass and ceramics manufacturer in Mainz, Germany. Hanselman will take classes at the Technical University of Compiegne in France and intern for an as-yet undetermined company.Both students expect to follow up their URI education with graduate school, though they are leaving their options open to whatever other opportunities may arise from their research or their time abroad.
-- Annie Fisher, writing in Fortune Magazine, 9/7/2006
Chemical Engineering among the top 20 highest paying careers
-- Anthony Balderrama writing at CareerBuilder.com, 1/23/2009
Chemical Engineering involves applying fundamental principles of chemistry, physics, and biology to the engineering of processes — the transformation of a "thing" to some other "thing" -- and products -- the things themselves. What makes chemical engineering so exciting nowadays is that the same underlying concepts and approaches can be applied to such a wide variety of problems:
| biological processes | polymers | fuel cells | process engineering | colloids | nanotechnology | corrosion | process safety and efficiency | environmental protection | surfaces and sensors | pollution prevention | thermodynamics |
How much reacts, and how quickly? How much moves in response to a natural or imposed gradient? What does this mean on the molecular level? While a cell, an oil refinery, and a semiconductor surface seem very different from one another, and in many ways they are, chemical engineers focus on the similarities in order to improve how each one transforms raw ingredients into desirable products.
The department offers undergraduate and graduate programs in Chemical Engineering, as well as a unique undergraduate program in Chemical and Ocean Engineering. Several undergraduates participate in the International Engineering Program, working and taking certain core courses overseas at partner universities. In all these programs we strive to achieve a detailed set of overall program objectives.
Research in the department is sponsored by Federal and State agencies, private foundations, and industry. University partnerships help to provide multidisciplinary opportunities for faculty and students whose interests fall at the boundaries of chemical engineering.
For more information, we invite you to browse our web pages or to contact the department directly.
Biology Track in Chemical Engineering
The popular biology track was first available to undergraduate chemical engineering students in Fall 2005 and is continuing to attract new interest to the department. Its curriculum combines chemical engineering and biology courses, forming a major that combines the quantitative nature of chemical engineering with the concepts and ideas of biology and molecular biology.
Visit the biology track web page for additional information, or compare it with the other programs offered in the department. Also see the URI press release, which led to a Providence Journal news story on June 22, 2005.
Pharmaceutical Engineering Track
A Pharmaceutical track in the Chemical Engineering major is
now available
at URI. See the
Curriculum page for a list of
courses in this program, or compare it with
the other programs offered in the department. The program had also
been promoted in the URI
Facts about Fall 2007.
