Work has been quite varied over the last few weeks. I've had some follow-up work from my trip up north to Gulbarga - mainly assessing their options for cooking and passing on information about their requirements for other solar installations such as a solar powered water pump for the well.
While I was there I spoke to them about the option of producing biogas as fuel for their cooking (this is made by using the breakdown of waste material - from food, agriculture, animal dung etc.). Biogas is being increasingly used all over India and it is relatively simple to set up when you have a source of waste to use. There is another name here for gas produced using manure- "Gobar gas". They had about 50 cows on site plus a few deer so it seems like a perfect option for them to set up a biogas plant and use this waste. Biogas plants output flammable gas as well as a slurry which is ideal as a fertiliser for agriculture. Despite this, they were very resistant to the idea- with a whole host of objections about how its smelly (which is surprisingly not true), the slurry doesn't work on the "black" soil in the area, and a general feeling that it "isn't something we do round here". SELCO have some project work looking into biogas plants which Vidyut is carrying out until he heads back to college, so he's looking the objections from the guys at the school.
I spent a while looking into the options for using cookers which use biomass pellets that burn cleanly, more efficiently and are kind to the environment - but this option still gave too much uncertainty about how much money they could save on fuel and makes them dependent on a single fuel supplier. I ended up making a comparison between these pellet stoves and some larger scale improved firewood stoves - particularly looking at those created by Sustaintech - a social enterprise which has come out of TIDE. Using this type of stove almost eliminates smoke and soot production as well as burning wood far more efficiently- I found that if they moved from a three-stone stove (open fire) set-up they could save as much as Rs.3000-5000 per month which is a huge amount for them.
I've been spending quite a bit of time working on a couple of different projects in the lab this week- some design and research work on a solar- hybrid food drier which is to be used at a fishing cooperative in Mangalore. This is Nishant's (he's going to be at SELCO for a year) main project and the idea is that fish can be dried in order to preserve it and it doesn't go to waste, while saving money and energy on burning large amounts of fuel. Its quite a complicated problem- balancing air flow, getting optimum drying temperature and collecting enough solar energy to drive it is difficult.
The other project I've been working on is with Sebastian, designing a test rig for a small scale paddy separator which separates rice paddy from dehusked rice. Again- its a more complicated problem than it sounds- especially when you are constrained to designing with the materials, components and expertise that are locally available. The whole point in the design is that it can be easily replicated in poor farming areas and so our design must be cheap, sturdy and effective, otherwise its never going to be used.
Hopefully that wasn't too dull to read! I'll get some nice pictures up soon, but for now I'll leave you with a photo of the view out the lab window yesterday evening:
Hi Graeme!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. No it wasn't too dull to read-your blog is proper professional! Well impressed. It's fantastic that you have the skills to make such a difference to people's lives in India, and what a great project to be involved in.
David