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Nigerian students from Washington State University (WSU) are designing a portable gasifier system that turns waste into electricity.
- According to the team, 20 pounds of trash can produce about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy per day.
- The project intends to provide waste-to-power technology on a smaller scale for Nigerian households.
Students from Washington State University (WSU) are designing a portable gasifier system that turns waste into electricity. According to Corey Ndifon, WSU engineering senior and CEO of the team, these gasifier systems already used for large scale power generation, but their project intends to provide the technology on a smaller scale that can be beneficial to households in Nigeria and other developing companies where power supply challenges are endemic.
Gasification is a process used to transform solid waste, garbage and trash into gases like nitrogen and oxygen that can then be burnt for energy generation. The team’s design will incorporate solar panels as an alternative source to start the gasifier, with the risk of releasing toxic gases being minimized via a filtration system inserted in the device entrance.
According to the team, 20 pounds of trash can produce about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy per day, about 33 per cent of the daily energy consumed by the average American household.
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“The end goal is to help the more rural regions of Nigeria, and other emerging nations, have stable electricity,” Ndifon said. Another member of the team is Maximillian Obasiolu, WSU engineering senior and chief business development officer. Ndifon and Obasiolu are both Nigerians and designed the system with the country in mind. According to them, the work and market research for designing a portable gasification system began in August 2020.
For the power generation, the team initially set out to use a large turbine engine but were put off due to the engine’s complexity and possible complications. Instead, the system will have a smaller four-stroke engine.
“Since we’re going to be essentially shipping a device to a foreign country, we want to make sure that if and when the device breaks, repairs on it are going to be as simple as possible,” Obasiolu said. With a four-stroke engine, the device will run for extended periods of time, but people can repair it more easily.
The team plan to sell their gasifier to international nongovernmental organizations, specifically the United Nations Development Program because it has connections with commerce and transportation and can disperse the system.
The team still needs about $100,000to complete the system design, build and transport the product by the end of the year.