To
most people, urine is a waste fluid that’s promptly flushed away as soon as
it’s expelled (unless you abide by the “yellow let it mellow” rule). But to
scientists, your pee could be the golden font that advances carbon fuel-cell
technology.
Korean
scientists have demonstrated that carbon, a precious fuel cell material, can be
extracted from dried urine and that it is a powerful conductor of electricity.
The
findings, published Monday in Nature,
offer an economical way to advance fuel cell technology, and could also improve
the environment if deployed on a large scale.
Urine Power
Fuel
cells — devices which harvest energy from a chemical reaction — often
use platinum as a catalyst, making them expensive to produce. Researchers have
been exploring ways to replace the metal with carbon. However carbon
nanostructures, created synthetically, can also be quite expensive.
Now
researchers from South Korea have proven that equally effective carbon
compounds can be extracted from urine — making them a cheap stand-in for
platinum or synthetic carbon.
To
test the potential of pee, scientists collected urine samples from healthy
individuals. Then, they heated individuals’ samples to evaporate the water,
leaving behind a dried, yellowish deposit. Next, they super-heated various test
samples of dried urine in a range between 700 and 1,000 degrees Celsius for six
hours to carbonize the urine.
The
heating process caused salts and other elements to gasify and leave behind
carbon. Urine is loaded with other elements besides carbon, which makes the
leftover carbon highly porous — ideal for fuel cell catalysts. As an added
bonus, the gasified salts solidified and clung to the furnace wall after
cooling; researchers say it’s possible to harvest these remnants for commercial
use as de-icing salts.
Most
importantly, the urine carbon was an excellent conductor of electricity,
especially the batch that was heated to 1,000 degrees. Researchers said this is
the first time carbon was extracted from urine using this simple method.
An Abundant Resource
Roughly
300 to 400 milligrams of urine carbon can be extracted from a single liter of
urine, which means a single person can generate up to 0.2 ounces of the
fuel catalyst a day. Multiply that by everyone using the restroom at this very
moment, and you have yourself an abundant resource.
Researchers
said urine could easily be collected at public restrooms and dried outdoors by
the sun to create the yellowish powder that starts the process. Where these
open fields of urine will reside is another question. But researchers say their
findings could help put our waste, which pollutes waterways with phosphates and
pharmaceuticals, to good use.
It’s certainly a lot
to contemplate for your next trip to the lavatory.
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