Português

Newsroom

Newsroom

14|07|2010 - 09h04A New Approach to Biofuel in Africa

Biofuel potential

By New York Times

The biofuel concept: If you just burn plant materials, you put out a lot of bad pollutants. But if you heat the materials in a container without oxygen (“pyrolysis”), you leave most of the carbon as “biochar,” which makes an excellent soil additive (in fact Amazon Indians built up rich soils over hundreds of years using biochar). The gas that is given off by pyrolysis can be processed into clean-burning fuel. All of which sounds great, but skeptics point out that Africa is a prime target for biofuel land grabs, which destroy small farms and forest preserves. Hence the importance of using agricultural residues like corn cobs, and researching the impact.

If you send a known gas mixture into the biofuel apparatus, you get some characteristic flame “profile” –shape, color and temperature. Now send through an unknown gas at the same rate—produced by pyrolysis of corn cobs for example—and you can find the nearest profile, giving a rough assessment for the biofuel potential, which is all we need for our mission here. In December we will bring KNUST students back to RPI, where they will carry out more precise testing of the chemical composition.

 

But you can’t compare flames unless you have the gases flowing at the same rate, and our flow meter needed a final adjustment inside its tube. We couldn’t find a needle-nose pliers or tweezers to reach inside, but KNUST resourcefulness had rubbed off on our undergrad engineers at this point, and they fashioned a tool from a spare hairpin. With the addition of a combustion chamber adapted from a filter canister, the system is now ready for testing.

Audrey Bennett’s HIV workshop had also taken a productive turn. She began with a half-dozen KNUST students, and they discussed their understanding of HIV transmission and local prevention campaigns. One of them maintained that there are condom shortages in Ghana, especially on Valentine ’s Day. Favorite prevention campaigns included a local KNUST billboard, “Acquire a degree, not HIV,” and a billboard showing a bus covered with a condom (emphasizing the transmission that occurs in the context of migrant workers and transportation). Audrey then showed them the posters created by a rural group in Kenya during one of her previous projects, and an interactive poster she had created, based on one of the Kenyan designs, that allowed users to change images and text.

Finally it was time to set the students lose on creating their own sketches for poster concepts. Fortunately the student who had what everyone agreed was the best design—a soccer-based poster that read “Give AIDS the red card”—was able to find time to return to his community and test out the idea. He reported that several suggested the poster should also show a condom. Audrey held a quick photo shoot (the original image showed a white hand holding the card), and soon had a finished prototype. Her next steps will be to create a small hand-out to go with the poster—an actual red card with HIV prevention tips.

Lastly, the math education project at Ayeduase jr. high school: on our final two days we focused on fractals. First we just covered the idea of repeated geometric transformations using cornrow hairstyles. Since the website includes a cultural history of cornrows, this gave me a chance to see how the students in Ghana thought about their connection to African American culture. They were a bit more reluctant to discuss the slave trade era (perhaps only because they knew less about it), but just like African American students they all wanted to focus on the hip-hop section of the history.

On the final day we moved from the simple scaling series of cornrows to the fully recursive patterns of other African Fractals. We had previously found a spectacular example of fractal kente cloth in Bonwire, and the students used our software to produce some terrific fractal designs of their own. Several seemed fascinated by fractals in Ethiopian designs related to Christianity. My favorite was a piece two students created that featured a scaling array of crosses. But I have to say that the best moment for me was when we left the computer lab and walked outside to look at fractals in bark and branches. It was that moment when they connected math and African culture to their own power to investigate the world around them.


Related News

Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory (CTBE)

Integrate Brazilian Center of Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) – Campinas-SP
Phone: +55 (19) 3512-1010 | Fax: +55 (19) 3518-3104
© 2013 CTBE - All rights reserved | Develop by ClickNow®