It's a good idea because if you use banana peels -that are produced as a biproduct in everyday cooking- as fuel instead of wood, you don't have to spend hours everyday collecting wood from the remote forests. It's resource effective and will also reduce deforestation.
Churning and pressing can be done by hand and drying by the sun. Joel only uses the oven to save time and the autoamatic press because he needs consistent briquettes for his scientific testing. It's early days though.
We used a traditional African mortice and pestle today. It was hard work, but quite theraputic! We need to work out how long to let the banana skins rot down to get the best consistency. Mixing with some sawdust or other dry material (leaves, etc) makes a good briquette.
Really impressed with you conviction and passion to contribute...you didnt mind getting the hands dirty :).... Though emission (gases) and heat obtained is important for future commercial use...another factor being banana skins used as fuel are now not used as soil's natural fertilizer...but despite all, I admire your zeal to get things done (and eat out with energy you prepared by own)
this is so awesome. i love it when people think of cheap and non wasteful ways to solve problems like this... recycling/resourcefulness is great! try not to waste anything!
yeah, I agree. it was a bit of a rush filming it. we used lots of briquettes to make sure that the fire lasted during the filming (too many briquettes really)
yes, in kenya we use the sun to dry the briquettes, but for the research in the UK we needed to use an oven to produce briquettes with repeatable properties for our tests
What he doesn't mention is that the "rotting waste“ is an important agent of fertilization for the soil it rots onto. If they grew bananas, and didn't let the rinds decompose on that soil, the soil nutrients would quickly deplete. Then, you need nitrogen-based fertilizers, and all the problems that can cause.
The ash left from burning can be returned to the soil. The process of combustion only turns the cellulose and lignin to gases, the minerals etc still remain in the ash. An important thing to rmember is that almost all of a plant is made of air. Only trace elements in soil are used by the plant
He also said that they'd normally use other parts of the banana plant, such as the stems, but since he didn't have any, he used sawdust. Also, he demonstrated briquettes made without sawdust.
Very interesting project! It would be interesting to burn a sample of that into a calorimeter, in order to actually see how much energy you can obtain from that.
IF the guy in the video gets this, maybe he should check out South America too. If they would save time on finding firewood by using banana peels, that would help them alot. In Peru wen I went there, the guy told me all they eat is plantains, fish, and yucca...
So what kind of fuel would you need to bake the briquettes with? Could you bake enough that this would be efficient? This is a really exciting prospect, great post!
Due to the size and density of the simple dried banana skin you would get pretty much a very low coefficient of "good" work. So most of the energy you'd waste to ignite the dried banana would be to ignite the banana. The point of the banana skin pureeXsawdust is - using the minimal amount of heat(fire) to ignite and use for a long period of time this organic "firewood". I'm sure they checked this out and found out that you'd get more heat and power from burning that pressurised sawdustXbanana
I don't think you fully understood my point. I didn't mean that the problem with this would be the ashes that are produced in the process, it is the gases that would be produced, that would contain nutritions such as nitrogen. What i didn't think of was that the energy needed to produce gasenous compounds with the nutritions would be a lot larger that what the burning of the waste would be able to produce. In other words would the nutritions still remain in the ashes.
Our bodies need a *small* amount of potassium. However, it is much easier to dispose of potassium in the stomach versus the lungs. Same principle applies to plutonium. It's relatively safe to ingest plutonium versus breathing it because plutonium doesn't get absorbed easily. I used to work IT at a radioactive waste disposal project, I was trained on this stuff. Also, I did some academic work in local population radiation exposure, potassium spikes were common. However, the safety is debatable
@helenchg It's a bit like making a cake - use whatever you have available. We used sawdust, but dry banana leaves would work, or any other dry combustable material. The key is to get a mixture that can be squished together without being too wet or too dry.
So in theory, you could do this with any vegetable or any type of organic waste, such as gardenwaste? Normally it would be used as compost, but using grass and leafs would be not that different from bananapeels I think.
Its a good idea, but I cant help seeing some problems here... 1: If you mix it with sawdust, you still need wood. 2: Why do you need to have them in a owen? They then need to have owen or some sort of fire to make them dry... In the sun maybee, but it takes a long time. 3: How long do they burn? And by the way, its not impressive to get the plate hot over flames... Anyway, good idea, keep em comming.
The only CO2 emission is the one the banana absorbed when it was formed. That would also have escaped to the air had the banana been rotting. This is a form of biomass so it's CO2 neutral and renewable.
But the difference is, a compost heap has different fertilizing properties from a pile of ashes, which is mostly carbon. I can't speak absolutely on the subject, as I'm not an expert on growing bananas, but there is more to it than simply the composition of the banana waste, there is the process of decomposition, which can introduce different bacteria, insects, etc, which may have other effects on the soil. This is just a thought, not really a rebuttal.
Yes, definitely going to be efficient in Africa, because you know a developing country definitely has high tech compressors and ovens every few blocks.
Oops! I was waiting on my slow connection. After I posted the grasses thing he brought up the stalks. I think the banana plant dies after one fruiting, annual.
@kickidii The same way, minus the compression machine. Putting things through a meatgrinder isn't all that hard. Throw in some stems, compress it by hand, and let it sit in the sun. The complication here is simply scientific like he said to see how they burn and what changes to techniques and ratios can be done to make them more efficient.
Hydrocarbons are our #1 source for combustible fuel. And besides, it's basically harmless. Consider this combustion reaction with methane: CH4 + 2O2 → 2 H2O + CO2 + Energy (Wikipedia). You're basically releasing water and carbon dioxide in any combustion reaction with pure hydrocarbons. Not harmful to the environment.
On a small research scale, it's hard to see how the return is worth it. But if done on a village scale, I'm sure the efficiencies would increase hugely.
You are on to something very usefull here! Couldn't stop thinking of another benevolent proj. that never really went operational for everyday users (but was fairly close). It was called "the rice husk projekt" in Bangladesh involving a 5hp Stirling engine run on burning rice husks. It's all in a publication/book (ISBN 0-9713918-1-5" written by L. Merrick Lockwood. Banana peels instead of husks is probably a good change of energy source, and locally available. Congrats to u on your work. /mtm
Chris Farley should have powered his school bus in "Billy Madison" on banana peels, things could have turned out different, if he had been looking out for stray peels to use...
First i thought that the idea was brilliant, but then i came across this one question about it; Isn't this accually decreasing the nutrition value of the soil in these areas? I mean that the waste parts of a banan contains probably a lot of nutrition, that will find its way back to the soil in which the bananas are grown if they are left on the bananafields. Wouldn't burning up these nutritions make the soil infertal in the long run?
Well so long as they look fine inside, you should be safe. The darker the color of the skin, essentially, the more of the banana has been converted to sugar.
the edible part of the banana is still edible and can be used its just the skins that people throw away. they aren't gonna start making huge plantations to start making these bricks cause there are already plenty of people eating bananas that have skins that are unused.
I think you've missed the point. We're using ovens to get consistent results in the lab, but drying in the sun is fine in Africa. Similarly we need to measure the force, but you can make briquettes using simple hand presses. Check out the Legacy Foundation who are doing some very good work in this area.
@kal9001 This research is more of a time-saver and physical waste reducer. People are already spending half the day trying to warm their homes with firewood, burning it just like they would with the b-bricks. They also do not use the banana skins. Killing two birds with one stone, you're saving time and land space by reusing waste. the CO2 emission is miniscule compared to fossil fuel and industrial waste, and would be no different than normal wood burning.
maybe, if the waste was mixed with other compostable material, but burning banana waste is better than cutting down trees for fuel in an unsustainable way.
I believe he chose bananas because of its availability in the areas he was talking about. In terms of energy to produce, a human could very well just use a mortar & pestle to grind the plant parts and then compress the paste with weights (hell, maybe pressing on the paste with our hands could be considered viable). As for drying, well, the sun might work out well enough.
That would be interesting to watch, but not to a large audience. Considering the state of the economy, agriculture and energetics in such African countries, this seems like a nice solution for some problems.
Yeah, maybe, but that's a different technology. Briquetting is just about the simplest way to turn waste into fuel, so we're starting with that method. Fermentation is another option...
Banana skins could be dried with the help of the sun of Africa, i think that the best thing would be measuring the heat of combustion of dried and compressed banana skins than comparing the energy produced with the energy necessary to grind and compress them
@jordanpasek Correction. I did not complain. Like others, I responded to the video pointing out practical problems should the project be applied mass scale. People living in the "Developed world " feel they know more about solving other peoples' problems instead of their own. Water is vital for people in such countries. Growing food crops as fuel is NOT one happy solution especially if the crop plants depend on irrigation to make adequate bananas to make bricks!
Pretty much every kind of agriculture produces more waste products then it does food. So being able to find a use for crop waste is a very big thing. A good example the US for example may not have to import oil anymore if it could make alcohol from crop waste such as wheat chaff and corn stocks.
@kal9001 the process of decomposition would still produce a large amount of co2, and just fill up our landfills. sure you can use them for compost, but its a lot better to use garbage as fuel. you can take anything dead or even fecal matter and use that for compost
He's cooking bananas with bananas. That's bananas!
+Roudee 2/10 Not enough bananas. We need to go deeper: cooking bananas with bananas on a stove made from bananas! :D
@@Drakwdeanrer and the stove is located, you guessed it, in a kitchen made entirely out of bananas
I really hope somebody got this kid an electric grinder.
It's a good idea because if you use banana peels -that are produced as a biproduct in everyday cooking- as fuel instead of wood, you don't have to spend hours everyday collecting wood from the remote forests. It's resource effective and will also reduce deforestation.
Churning and pressing can be done by hand and drying by the sun. Joel only uses the oven to save time and the autoamatic press because he needs consistent briquettes for his scientific testing.
It's early days though.
nothing to do with singing banana?
We used a traditional African mortice and pestle today. It was hard work, but quite theraputic! We need to work out how long to let the banana skins rot down to get the best consistency. Mixing with some sawdust or other dry material (leaves, etc) makes a good briquette.
Imagine writing a 300 page thesis on bananas... he's gone bannanas
his hands are so dirty all the time even when he cooks the bananas
I'd be interested to see a follow up video to this that shows the BTU output of this compared to common fuels such as wood, coal, charcoal, LPG, etc.
He's like what, 20 years old and all outta breath cranking banana peels thru a grinder?
Really impressed with you conviction and passion to contribute...you didnt mind getting the hands dirty :)....
Though emission (gases) and heat obtained is important for future commercial use...another factor being banana skins used as fuel are now not used as soil's natural fertilizer...but despite all, I admire your zeal to get things done (and eat out with energy you prepared by own)
Where can i find more information on this, the compositions of the banana peels, etc?
in science class
@Digadogup: They would be sun-dried.... An oven is used in the lab just for speed (and because there is much less sun in England than Africa!)
this is so awesome. i love it when people think of cheap and non wasteful ways to solve problems like this... recycling/resourcefulness is great! try not to waste anything!
yeah, I agree. it was a bit of a rush filming it. we used lots of briquettes to make sure that the fire lasted during the filming (too many briquettes really)
Quite curious to see one of the briquettes made with added sawdust and to see how it burns compared to the 100% skin type
2:02 He doesn't lift
+Piano Man he's a PhD student... I don't think he has time to lift
Piano Man, He can take you for a lift in his helicopter
The by-products of burning the briquettes are the same as the ones which would be released as the banana waste was rotting.
yes, in kenya we use the sun to dry the briquettes, but for the research in the UK we needed to use an oven to produce briquettes with repeatable properties for our tests
What he doesn't mention is that the "rotting waste“ is an important agent of fertilization for the soil it rots onto. If they grew bananas, and didn't let the rinds decompose on that soil, the soil nutrients would quickly deplete.
Then, you need nitrogen-based fertilizers, and all the problems that can cause.
The ash left from burning can be returned to the soil. The process of combustion only turns the cellulose and lignin to gases, the minerals etc still remain in the ash.
An important thing to rmember is that almost all of a plant is made of air. Only trace elements in soil are used by the plant
this is amazing, this guy has just helped so many people in need out
He also said that they'd normally use other parts of the banana plant, such as the stems, but since he didn't have any, he used sawdust.
Also, he demonstrated briquettes made without sawdust.
A factory fire log is basically saw dust and wax.
i'm curious to know how long the bricketts burned for and what kind of emissions were produced.
What are the other items in the stove he used to cook his lunch?
In Africa the briquettes are for cooking rather than heating, but in Nepal, charcoal briquettes have both functions.
no machine needed - the method works well just using hands to do the squishing and the sun to dry the briquettes
yup - we use a traditional mortar and pestle "in the field" and dry using the sun.
So did this project go anywhere or what..?
Very interesting project!
It would be interesting to burn a sample of that into a calorimeter, in order to actually see how much energy you can obtain from that.
IF the guy in the video gets this, maybe he should check out South America too. If they would save time on finding firewood by using banana peels, that would help them alot. In Peru wen I went there, the guy told me all they eat is plantains, fish, and yucca...
So what kind of fuel would you need to bake the briquettes with? Could you bake enough that this would be efficient? This is a really exciting prospect, great post!
Is there an update on his research?
Solar Cookers use reflective material to focus the suns rays on an area where you can cook food. It doesnt use Solar Panels.
Due to the size and density of the simple dried banana skin you would get pretty much a very low coefficient of "good" work. So most of the energy you'd waste to ignite the dried banana would be to ignite the banana. The point of the banana skin pureeXsawdust is - using the minimal amount of heat(fire) to ignite and use for a long period of time this organic "firewood".
I'm sure they checked this out and found out that you'd get more heat and power from burning that pressurised sawdustXbanana
I don't think you fully understood my point. I didn't mean that the problem with this would be the ashes that are produced in the process, it is the gases that would be produced, that would contain nutritions such as nitrogen. What i didn't think of was that the energy needed to produce gasenous compounds with the nutritions would be a lot larger that what the burning of the waste would be able to produce.
In other words would the nutritions still remain in the ashes.
I'd like to add that this is an example of where this guy has a good idea, but needs to sell it better
@Nannarii No, it would be more-or-less the same process used to produce regular charcoal; but with coconut shells substituted for wood.
Our bodies need a *small* amount of potassium. However, it is much easier to dispose of potassium in the stomach versus the lungs. Same principle applies to plutonium. It's relatively safe to ingest plutonium versus breathing it because plutonium doesn't get absorbed easily. I used to work IT at a radioactive waste disposal project, I was trained on this stuff.
Also, I did some academic work in local population radiation exposure, potassium spikes were common. However, the safety is debatable
gathering, peeling, and drying are already free/done with free will because they just want to eat what's inside.
@helenchg It's a bit like making a cake - use whatever you have available. We used sawdust, but dry banana leaves would work, or any other dry combustable material. The key is to get a mixture that can be squished together without being too wet or too dry.
Search for Solar Cooker on wikipedia or google, you will find loads about them
So in theory, you could do this with any vegetable or any type of organic waste, such as gardenwaste? Normally it would be used as compost, but using grass and leafs would be not that different from bananapeels I think.
Its a good idea, but I cant help seeing some problems here... 1: If you mix it with sawdust, you still need wood. 2: Why do you need to have them in a owen? They then need to have owen or some sort of fire to make them dry... In the sun maybee, but it takes a long time. 3: How long do they burn? And by the way, its not impressive to get the plate hot over flames... Anyway, good idea, keep em comming.
Kudos for getting the knowledge out there. Nice work! Keep going!!
WOW! You are my hero! What did you find abotu the gases? how are they different from regular fuel like coal? Is it on the website?
The only CO2 emission is the one the banana absorbed when it was formed. That would also have escaped to the air had the banana been rotting.
This is a form of biomass so it's CO2 neutral and renewable.
How much energy does it take to make one brick?
But the difference is, a compost heap has different fertilizing properties from a pile of ashes, which is mostly carbon.
I can't speak absolutely on the subject, as I'm not an expert on growing bananas, but there is more to it than simply the composition of the banana waste, there is the process of decomposition, which can introduce different bacteria, insects, etc, which may have other effects on the soil. This is just a thought, not really a rebuttal.
But wouldn't the bricks have a danger of spontaneous combustion while drying out in the oven?
Yes, definitely going to be efficient in Africa, because you know a developing country definitely has high tech compressors and ovens every few blocks.
also that other guy was on about Ethiopia, the guy in the vid was talking about Rwanda, which are 2 different places
Oops! I was waiting on my slow connection. After I posted the grasses thing he brought up the stalks. I think the banana plant dies after one fruiting, annual.
What if you put those briquettes in a rocket stove?
Is burning of banana gives substance for the receptor for feel good?
What about the cost?
@kickidii The same way, minus the compression machine. Putting things through a meatgrinder isn't all that hard. Throw in some stems, compress it by hand, and let it sit in the sun. The complication here is simply scientific like he said to see how they burn and what changes to techniques and ratios can be done to make them more efficient.
How much energy is needed for mixing, compressing and drying it?
Burning biomass is one of the most sustainable ways of creating energy. But between the reality and this project, there is a big gap.
Hydrocarbons are our #1 source for combustible fuel. And besides, it's basically harmless. Consider this combustion reaction with methane:
CH4 + 2O2 → 2 H2O + CO2 + Energy (Wikipedia).
You're basically releasing water and carbon dioxide in any combustion reaction with pure hydrocarbons. Not harmful to the environment.
is this okay to use instead of coal?
Right. And the amount of energy used by the oven to dry a single briquet is...?
How many tons of pressure do you need to squish the pulp?
Is this really going to work?
But why?
This is research in effort to help the needs of less fortunate people in Africa. It's a shame you don't think this endeavor is worthwhile.
Is it worth all that effort and enery to make that, do you get more enery than you spend making these bricks?
On a small research scale, it's hard to see how the return is worth it. But if done on a village scale, I'm sure the efficiencies would increase hugely.
google "fuel out of banana skins and sawdust " for an update
You are on to something very usefull here!
Couldn't stop thinking of another benevolent proj. that never really went operational for everyday users (but was fairly close). It was called "the rice husk projekt" in Bangladesh involving a 5hp Stirling engine run on burning rice husks. It's all in a publication/book (ISBN 0-9713918-1-5" written by L. Merrick Lockwood. Banana peels instead of husks is probably a good change of energy source, and locally available.
Congrats to u on your work.
/mtm
Chris Farley should have powered his school bus in "Billy Madison" on banana peels, things could have turned out different, if he had been looking out for stray peels to use...
if only we had figured this earlier we coukdve arranged the system to do more stuff like this instead if digging up all that coal
Is it actually banana or plantain?
First i thought that the idea was brilliant, but then i came across this one question about it; Isn't this accually decreasing the nutrition value of the soil in these areas? I mean that the waste parts of a banan contains probably a lot of nutrition, that will find its way back to the soil in which the bananas are grown if they are left on the bananafields.
Wouldn't burning up these nutritions make the soil infertal in the long run?
Well so long as they look fine inside, you should be safe. The darker the color of the skin, essentially, the more of the banana has been converted to sugar.
excellent research. more unis should show the research they're doing in this way. it's really interesting and kind of motivating
Why do you not use a bomb calorimeter to measure the enthalpy of combustion?
the edible part of the banana is still edible and can be used its just the skins that people throw away. they aren't gonna start making huge plantations to start making these bricks cause there are already plenty of people eating bananas that have skins that are unused.
I think you've missed the point. We're using ovens to get consistent results in the lab, but drying in the sun is fine in Africa. Similarly we need to measure the force, but you can make briquettes using simple hand presses. Check out the Legacy Foundation who are doing some very good work in this area.
@kal9001 This research is more of a time-saver and physical waste reducer. People are already spending half the day trying to warm their homes with firewood, burning it just like they would with the b-bricks. They also do not use the banana skins. Killing two birds with one stone, you're saving time and land space by reusing waste. the CO2 emission is miniscule compared to fossil fuel and industrial waste, and would be no different than normal wood burning.
So if those are what they call bananas, what do they call the sweet fruit that is the same shape?
What a fantastic research project. I hope something comes of this.
man, this dude is really excited about his work. good to see.
How much energy was used in the compression stage and the heating and hardening stage? Surely that makes the process wasteful?
maybe, if the waste was mixed with other compostable material, but burning banana waste is better than cutting down trees for fuel in an unsustainable way.
The problem is that the banana waste that rots fertilizes the fields. This is cool and all, but eventually the field will run out of stuff.
You can use the ash if you want. You have to add nitrogen because that escapes as gas. But most stuff is still in the ash.
I believe he chose bananas because of its availability in the areas he was talking about. In terms of energy to produce, a human could very well just use a mortar & pestle to grind the plant parts and then compress the paste with weights (hell, maybe pressing on the paste with our hands could be considered viable). As for drying, well, the sun might work out well enough.
That would be interesting to watch, but not to a large audience.
Considering the state of the economy, agriculture and energetics in such African countries, this seems like a nice solution for some problems.
yup, that's next on the research plan...
Yeah, maybe, but that's a different technology. Briquetting is just about the simplest way to turn waste into fuel, so we're starting with that method. Fermentation is another option...
He only baked them at 105 F, which is comparable to leaving them in hot sunlight.
This is probably one of the most useful things I've seen in a long time. Great job guys!
the whole process of creating the briquette requires more energy than the briquette itself...great!
Banana skins could be dried with the help of the sun of Africa, i think that the best thing would be measuring the heat of combustion of dried and compressed banana skins than comparing the energy produced with the energy necessary to grind and compress them
This is intriguing. I do have reservations about the amount of energy it takes to produce these 'bricks' but I will allow it for now. ;)
science shines when it helps people who cant help themselves. good work!
@jordanpasek Correction. I did not complain. Like others, I responded to the video pointing out practical problems should the project be applied mass scale. People living in the "Developed world " feel they know more about solving other peoples' problems instead of their own. Water is vital for people in such countries. Growing food crops as fuel is NOT one happy solution especially if the crop plants depend on irrigation to make adequate bananas to make bricks!
BRILLIANT. There are already wind polar, corn energy, fart energy, and poop energy. Now there's banana!
wat is the specific heat capacity of it? I think you need more energy to produce than you get.... and it´s a lot of work...
Pretty much every kind of agriculture produces more waste products then it does food.
So being able to find a use for crop waste is a very big thing.
A good example the US for example may not have to import oil anymore if it could make alcohol from crop waste such as wheat chaff and corn stocks.
@kal9001
the process of decomposition would still produce a large amount of co2, and just fill up our landfills. sure you can use them for compost, but its a lot better to use garbage as fuel. you can take anything dead or even fecal matter and use that for compost