Nano Membrane team member, Tosin Somorin, commended

We are really pleased that Nano Membrane Toilet team member Tosin Somorin has been highly commended at the Women Leaders Milton Keynes Awards.   Tosin's work on the combustor element is vital to the development of the toilet.   You can see Tosin speaking about her work in this video (from 4:35) and read her latest paper on the toilet here.

Lab stories video

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has just made a video of interviews with the Nano Membrane Toilet team which helps explain some of our current thinking and gives an insight into the lab work behind the toilet development:

Fuel blending

Fuel blending is being considered to upgrade faeces prior to combustion in the gasifier.   This paper describes the results of experimental work to prove the concept.   It is free to download.

Onabanjo Somorin, T., Kolios. A.J., Parker, A., McAdam, E., Williams, L., Tyrrel, S. Faecal-wood biomass co-combustion and ash composition analysis, Fuel 2013, 781-791

Fuel blending is a widely used approach in biomass combustion, particularly for feedstocks with low calorific value and high moisture content. In on-site sanitation technologies, fuel blending is proposed as a pre-treatment requirement to reduce moisture levels and improve the physiochemical properties of raw faeces prior to drying. This study investigates the co-combustion performance of wood dust: raw human faeces blends at varying air-to-fuel ratios in a bench-scale combustor test rig. It concludes with ash composition analyses and discusses their potential application and related problems. The study shows that a 50:50 wood dust (WD): raw human faeces (FC) can reduce moisture levels in raw human faeces by ∼40% prior to drying. The minimum acceptable blend for treating moist faeces without prior drying at a combustion air flow rate of 14–18 L/min is 30:70 WD: FC. For self-sustained ignition and flame propagation, the minimum combustion temperature required for conversion of the fuel to ash is ∼400 °C. The most abundant elements in faecal ash are potassium and calcium, while elements such as nickel, aluminium and iron are in trace quantities. This suggests the potential use of faecal ash as a soil conditioner, but increases the tendency for fly ash formation and sintering problems.

Designing the screw

The screw is a critical component in the toilet, allowing the settled solids to be removed from the bottom of the holding chamber and transported towards the gasifier/combustor.   This separates them from the liquid.   Traditional source separating designs require a change of user behaviour, whereas our aspiration is to make using the Nano Membrane Toilet a comparable experience to using a "conventional" water-flush toilet.

We have been doing excperiments on the screw to determine the best charactertistocs to transport the solids but minimise the transport of liquids.   This has included changing the taper of the central shaft, makig the flights closer together near the top of the screw, and changing the rotation speed.   the results are described in this recently published, free-to-access paper:

Mercer, E.,  P. Cruddas , L. Williams , A. Kolios , A. Parker , S. Tyrrel , E. Cartmell , M. Pidou and E. J. McAdam (2016) Selection of screw characteristics and operational boundary conditions to facilitate post-flush urine and faeces separation within single household sanitation systems, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol., 2, 953-964

Abstract:
To ensure adequate access to sanitation in developing economies, off-grid single household sanitation has been proposed which obviates the need for significant infrastructure capital investment. Whilst treatment at this scale is most efficient when coupled to source separation (i.e. urine from faeces), existing source separation solutions have proved difficult to implement in this context. In this study, screw extrusion is therefore investigated to provide ‘post-flush’ source separation. Both screw characteristics and operational boundary conditions were evaluated. Preferential screw characteristics included tapering of the shaft and progressive pitch reduction, linked to a small extrusion aperture, the combination of which enhanced solids extrusion efficiency and promoted higher solids concentration in the extruded fraction. Whilst maximum extrusion efficiency was observed at high rotational speeds (over 400 rpm), this also promoted free water transport. Operating below 300 rpm instead introduced selectivity for transport of faecal sludge over urine, enabling phase separation. Constraining the volumetric ratio of urine to faeces also enhanced the extrusion rate of faecal sludge by increasing feed viscosity sufficient to overcome backpressure imposed by unmasticated food particles that would otherwise restrict separation. Importantly, this study demonstrates the feasibility of screw extrusion for ‘post flush’ separation of urine and faeces which constitutes a significant advancement towards realising sanitation at a single household scale.