Hydrogen Factory in a Bottle: Getting Hydrogen from Organic Waste and Anaerobic Bacteria

Overview

Objectives/Goals I am trying to produce hydrogen as a clean energy source. The two current methods to obtain hydrogen are either expensive or pollute. Can I get hydrogen from anaerobic bacteria and organic waste? Hypothesis: It is possible to obtain hydrogen from organic waste using anaerobic bacteria. Methods/Materials In this experiment I baked dirt to isolate heat resistant spores of anaerobic bacteria. I then chopped and boiled corn stalk and combined it with the dirt in a bottle, removing oxygen. From this I collected biogas, and attempted to isolate hydrogen by having it leak from a balloon. Finally, I used a mass spectrometer to determine if I had produced and isolated hydrogen. Results I got a total of 109 ml. of biogas, but only 1.5 ml of gas escaped the balloon. With the mass spectrometer, I proved that this was almost pure hydrogen. Conclusions/Discussion I believe that I have proven my hypothesis, but my methods have also proven to be inefficient. Although I did not prove that you could run a hydrogen economy on organic waste I did learn a great deal.

Awards (1)

• Category Award

Competition history

• CSEF 2004 Environmental Engineering · Entry J0808

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Environmental Engineering projects
• CSEF Environmental Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2004 project