I'm a freshman engineer student and I could use some help. One of my classes is called Challenges of Enginery and the topic is to create a big project on a random subject. This year is creating a machine that reduces the production of garbage. I still have time, but my group and I can't think of any good projects. The projects have to be original, functional and must not generate more garbage than the one it eliminates. If anyone has any idea that they could share i would be really grateful.
(random pic for attention)
>>986408
Well here's one, a machine that creates honeycomb instead of corrugated cardboard for boxes. you get the same strength of box while reducing the material used, so end up with a reduction in garbage.
Algae -> biopolymer/cellulose generation as a sheet -> thick sheets you can stamp into compostable dining ware. Maybe integrate a stiff but energy-intensive biopolymer to make the dining ware out of a composite of multiple different types of plastics.
Maybe integrate fertilizer into it, so that your compost generates good stuff for plants, so that your plants power an aquaponics system with algal biofuel, so that somehow you can go right back to manufacturing dining ware.
No one will ever have to wash dishes again. Everyone grills. Beans and rice are cooked in gigantic self-cleaning basins.
FUCK I HATE YOU REAGON AND BUSH FOR CANCELING THE ALGAL BIOFUELS PROGRAM, FFFFFUUUUUUUUUCCCKKK YOOOOOOOUUUUUUU!!!
Btw the was a future home from the 50s or 60s that also involved no cleaning of dishes nor use of any pots nor utensils for cooking, BUT FUCKING REPUBLICANS STRUCK DOWN ALL THE RELATED RESEARCHES AGAIN FUCK YOU EISEMHOWER!!!
>>986417
You mean like bioplastic with algae? I've heard that you could do something like that with agar-agar... I really like the idea, care to elaborate a little more? There was this one group with agar-agar based medical packing, but it wasn't that well received. Maybe with a better formula and less specific applications it could work well.
>>986424
I was actually listing two separate bio-manufacturing pathways m8 and stringing them together incoherently, but I never knew about the agar-agar thing.
Wow, I actually cannot find what I read back in high school about cellulose mats from algae. It was a thing on Hackaday, I think, and you were supposed to buy a little tub like for storing towellettes or small tools, then you filled it with purified water, then a specific saline solution, then put an electric potential across it, then add a foodstuff for the bacteria. The bacteria would slowly eat the food while moving from the cathode to the above, I think, and a low density but thick sheet of cellulose would be left behind. The electric potential was for the purpose of granting direction and order to the cellulosic by-product, that was the only purpose served by the salt.
Now, I can't find that article, but let us instead say we wanted to learn more about the properties of this cellulose. Well, I found, for certain algal blooms,
>... confirmed that algic cellulose consists solely of d-glucose monomers and shows characteristic X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern similar to that of native cellulose from land plants.
This article starts by describing, lightly, the life-cycle of algal blooms and processes from there to materials. (It is a free article, and you can read its references with your college's privileges.)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/app.32959/full
Okay, now, that was constructive planning building from the bottom-up. However, we have a clear goal, so backward-planning from the garbage objective to optimize for, what about searching for biodegradable biomaterials? Such as Starting with Indonesian compostable plastic bags, learning how much time they need to compost, what kind of soil they need, etc. Fully categorizing the material parameterized by its geometry and form of manufacture.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tapioca+bio+degradation+polymer&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Etc.
>>986492
By the way, you could engineer bacteria to contain magnetite, produce cellulose, and be long-lived, then you could control production with a magnetic field.
A nerve gas bomb.
Set it off in every major city during their new years celebration, and there will be less people, and therefore less garbage production.
I'll take my nobel prize in cash.
>take paper/cardboard waste
>mulch it
>wet it
>add some grass seed
>form it into whatever shape you need
>let it dry
>use paper mulch things to reinforce ground that has recently been worked up or as earth barriers for landscaping to prevent erosion until plants take root
Do your own homework next time.
>>986492
Hey man, thanks a lot. I´m giving this a good read and I´ll see what I can come up with. I have some papers lying around about plastic contamination and viability of bioplastic, so i can make a decent investigation with all of this. This is probably my best chance, all of my others projects have been brutally destroyed lol
>>986522
Already designed biodegradable ground enforcers once, the amount of available usable cardboard waste proved to be not big enough to make a difference and the whole thing became nonviable. It´s not really homework as it is a year long project, I'm extremely desperate to the point where asking for ideas in 4chan became a possibility.
>>986557
Develop the algal biocycle thing and I will be eternally grateful.
I will be grateful like a cheese grater on a biological motorized bicycle.
Good luck m8.
>>986408
>This year is creating a machine that reduces the production of garbage
Maybe something simple like a shredder-recycler of paper and cardboard for the home that is roughly the size of a washing machine.
Shreds the cardboard, goes into a water float tank and the mulch that comes out could be dried as fuel bricks, put onto screens and dried into cardboard sheets etc
I don't know if its entirely original though.
>>986604
Plastic shredder + civic center containing manufacturing equipment like screw compression plastic thermoextruder things.
Oh, OP, there is a specific name for thermal shredding and recycling of thermoset plastic, maybe it can be used to help decontaminate a component of the bioplastic, thereby speeding-up its recycling process.
Combined-cycle WtE.
>Gasify waste in syngas generator
>Use syngas as fuel for a gas turbine generator
>Use lean turbine exhaust to feed an afterburning incinerator to combust remaining solid waste
>Put boiler/heat exchanger downstream of incinerator to power an external-combustion steam turbine generator
Should be more efficient than current waste-to-energy power stations.
>>986408
A trash can with a flap, 3 bins, and an AC electromagnet. Opening the flap activates the magnet attracting the any magnetic metal cans to the back and repelling any nonmagnetic metal to the front, when the flap closes the magnet turns off and the magnet metal can falls into the back recycling bin. Should be doable for any freshman engineer.
>>986615
What
No
Repelling non magnetic cans?
There's only two types of cans in wide use aluminum and steel, they are easy to sort already. Your trash can does nothing.
How long do you have? End of the year is coming quickly.
Your best bet for short time is some kind of repurposing gimmick. Something that breaks things down and builds shit from it.
Just throwing shit at the wall here, but consider a device that grinds up scrap steel and turns it into anything useful. Scrap is so stupid cheap that you can justify it for your project, and it never has to go farther than that. Hell nails are stupid easy to form, just have it turn scrap into nails and if your instructor points out that it is far cheaper to buy nails than purchase and operate the machine, feed him some crock of shit about how it for people who live in isolated areas like Alaska or eastern Russia, or even Africa, where they have materials and no way of recycling them, and logistics makes it economically inviable to just buy nails. TO make it real simple, just have it pump out rebar, it can be used for so much more than concrete work, and all you really have to do is form the scrap into a cylinder and run it through a press.
>>986623
>Repelling non magnetic cans?
What are eddy currents
>Your trash can does nothing
It separates the metals from the crap.
