Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 2 No. 2 Summer 2017 | Page 14

STORY, PHOTOS, & VIDEO BY ROSAIRE BUSHEY
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
Senior design team makes
fuel from food waste
A group of mechanical and civil and environ-
mental engineering students at Virginia Tech
are converting left over food waste to produce
electricity through a biogas generator, as part of
their senior design capstone project. The biogas generator student team is one of 50
teams that will display during the Senior Design
Expo on April 28, from 1-3:30 p.m. in the indoor
practice facility near Lane Stadium. The expo is
open to the public.
The students used waste from a campus dining
hall, to fuel the generator that produces enough
electricity to power a typical home. As a target,
the team set out to design and build a generator
that would generate 1 kilowatt of power with a
methane content of 50 percent. The end result
generates nearly 5 kilowatts with a methane
content of more than 60 percent. “When used at scale, a process like this does
several things,” said Steven Cox, an advisor to the
team and president of GkW Energy, which spon-
sored the team. “First, it reduces the amount of
product going into landfills – which the university
pays for by the pound. Second, it means we aren’t
shipping that product 75 miles and then returning
75 miles with compost, so it saves more money
MOMENTUM SUMMER'17
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