A team of researchers at the Department of Chemical Engineering has commissioned new equipment for producing renewable energy from waste materials.

The team, from the Department's Energy Research Laboratory, has developed a fluidised bed reactor for producing a clean-burning, hydrogen-rich fuel gas from municipal sewage sludge.

"Current methods to treat the vast quantities of sludge produced in Europe include spreading it on agricultural land, burning it or burying it in a landfill. There are quite a few negative connotations associated with these alternatives. Our work aims to give an environmentally acceptable one," says Dr Andrew Harris, project researcher and Research Fellow at Darwin College.

Dr Harris, together with his colleagues Dr John Dennis, Professors Alan Hayhurst and John Davidson and PhD student Stuart Scott, aim to produce a valuable hydrogen-rich gas from the waste material and at the same time minimise harmful emissions and by-products.

"There is a lot of talk at the moment about the new hydrogen economy, but nobody goes into much detail about where all this hydrogen is going to come from. Our technology has the potential to produce large quantities of hydrogen from waste materials, relatively cheaply," says Dr Dennis.

The project is funded by the EPSRC and the team hopes to be able to commercialise the technology upon completion.

The research team are not the only people in the University investigating the potential of the hydrogen economy. Recently the University received a 2million Euro grant to run a ground-breaking environmentally-friendly transport system fuelled by hydrogen. Buses will run between the West Cambridge site and the city centre in what would be the world's largest solar-hydrogen energy demonstration project.

The buses will be quieter and cleaner than their conventional counterparts - the only emission from their fuel cell engines will be water vapour. The technology at the heart of this project is an innovative system of photovoltaic cells that will convert sunlight into electricity, and then use the electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.


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