You Can Charge Your Phone With Urine!

"Urine-tricity"

Ha!I know you would be wondering what i am talking about this morning.well let me tell you that everything is possible or is becoming possible now with the continuous improvement and research into ways of making life easier for man.

The only thing that is impossible and very much unlikely yet is how to prevent death or how to bring back the dead.Of course certain diseases still cant be cured or prevented and that points to a higher being in charge of everything.

Waste not, want not, the saying goes, and researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory are turning something we all produce – urine – into clean electricity, or 'urine-tricity'.
It sounds outlandish, but earlier this year, at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair in New Delhi, India – co-hosted by the Indian Department of Biotechnology and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the team exhibited a functional urinal that was able to charge a phone using just urine, a world first. 


"It's very simple. The down pipe from the urinal goes straight into the box which contains the microbial fuel cells, it's as simple as that," Yannis Ieropoulos, professor and director of the Bristol BioEnergy Center at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, told CNBC.com in a phone interview. The Bristol Robotics Laboratory is a collaboration between the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol.

"There is no pumping, no kind of clever filters or membranes in place: it is the urine going straight down the pipe and into the microbial fuel cells," he added.
The microbial fuel cells – or MFCs – Ieropoulos refers to contain live, naturally occurring microorganisms. These feed on the urine and produce electrons as a respiratory by-product. Electrodes in the MFCs facilitate the transfer of these electrons and create current when connected via a circuit. 

The project Ieropoulos has been leading has received funding from, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"We're talking about urine simply because we haven't done experiments with faeces. There are groups out there which are looking to faeces, and believe me, there's a whole toilet world out there." 

What is Ieropoulos' ultimate aim? 

"Utilizing waste to generate useful energy and at the same time improve quality of life through sanitation." 

They have created a fuel cell that uses bacteria to break down the liquid waste to generate electricity.

They were then able to plug in a mobile phone to charge up its battery.

The device is currently slightly larger than a car battery, but the researchers believe they will be able to make smaller and more portable versions. 

Courtesy:CNBC and Dailymail Uk
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