Turning brewery wastewater into battery power
CU Boulder engineers have developed an innovative bio-manufacturing process that uses a biological organism cultivated in brewery wastewater to create the carbon-based materials needed to make energy storage cells. This unique pairing of breweries and batteries could set up a win-win opportunity by reducing expensive wastewater treatment costs for beer makers while providing manufacturers with a more cost-effective means of creating renewable, naturally-derived fuel cell technologies.
“Breweries use about 7 barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced,” said Tyler Huggins, CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “And they can’t just dump it into the sewer because it requires extra filtration.” The process of converting biomass, such as timber into carbon-based battery electrodes is currently used in some energy industry sectors. But, naturally-occurring biomass is inherently limited by its short supply, impact during extraction and intrinsic chemical makeup, rendering it expensive and difficult to optimize.
However, the researchers utilize the unsurpassed efficiency of biological systems to produce sophisticated structures and unique chemistries by cultivating a fast-growing fungus, Neurospora crassa, in the sugar-rich wastewater produced by a similarly fast-growing Colorado industry: breweries. By cultivating their feedstock in wastewater, they could dictate the fungus’s chemical and physical processes from the start. They created one of the most efficient naturally-derived lithium-ion battery electrodes known to date while cleaning the wastewater in the process.
If the process were applied on a large scale, breweries could potentially reduce their municipal wastewater costs significantly while manufacturers would gain access to a cost-effective incubating medium for advanced battery technology components.
Huggins and study co-author Justin Whiteley, also of CU Boulder, have filed a patent on the process and created Emergy, a Boulder-based company aimed at commercializing the technology. The researchers have partnered with Avery Brewing in Boulder in order to explore a larger pilot program for the technology. http://www.colorado.edu/today/2016/10/07/turning-brewery-wastewater-battery-power
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