Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Thunderf00t"
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@Thunderf00t I don't know if you saw my last comment on the other video, but I do control systems and one of my main projects between 2006 & 2011 was an industrial bio-conversion plant in Perth, Western Australia that processed Municipal Solid Waste (NSW). As a Brit I'll assume you know where Perth is.
Sorry if this is a lengthy reply but if you want any further material I'll see what I can get you.
Keep up the good work. I just hate technology scammers.
I don't know if in your work you've had to deal with a control system engineers but I have to deal with all types of engineers and technologists - mechanical, chemical and in that case microbiologists. Early on I asked what made their process special so I got an personalized education in the microbiology of composting. My job wasn't to make the bacteria do its funky stuff it was to build a control system that included the tools to let the microbiologists make the bacteria do its funky stuff.
So there are many details about the bacteria I never was privy to. It was just this stuff they called "water" except it was dark brown and smelt awful. I'd describe it as biologically active liquor.
Their process was pretty novel in how fast it worked (21 days). In the natural environment composting can take anywhere from months to years depending on all sorts of factors - the microorganism types (worms, slugs, etc.), bacteria types (single cell bugs), temperature, moisture, oxygen levels, existing soil type, light or lack of light,.... etc. The list is quite lengthy. That's not that great for industrial processes where they want consistency.
Most of the OTHER processes developed did things like heap up the compost into mounds out in paddocks and left to ferment in situ. That releases lots of stuff (CO2, CH4,.... etc.). Other places simply dumped it into an unused quarry or open cut mine and cap it with a giant rubber sheet and tap the gas as its produced. Other processes munch/mince it all up and put it into silos so they can tap off the combustibles like methane. If not watched those silos can get so hot they catch on fire.
In these processes you do get more than methane. I know I had to engineer the electrical system to handle hydrogen. There wasn't much of it but there was enough to influence the electrical design because hydrogen ignites so easily. And yes many of the clowns promoting hydrogen have no idea.
Mostly those systems that put compost into silos and leave it alone take 60-90 days (not hours) to decompose a batch into compost. The variation mainly comes from the time of year. Municipal waste has EVERYTHING we put in the wheely bins - food waste, cloth, plastics, metals, grass clippings, leaves,.... etc.
So just giving people the impression that Lomi can provide "composted" material in 4 hours is pretty much garbage.
The company I was working with had come up with a way to handle the seasonal changes and make the process extremely rapid by tailoring the bacterial decomp. They could do a batch of the organic fraction of municipal waste in 21 days complete cycle. Raw waste came in and was smashed in a giant tumbling garbage smasher. Almost a Lomi on Superman level steroids. After that the metals, sand, glass and plastics were removed and finally it was loaded into a vessel (about 4-5 stories high) where it was introduced to the bacteria. At that stage there was oxygen and the process was aerobic and produced CO2. After the vessel was full it was sealed and once the bacteria had finished consuming all the oxygen was when the real magic started.
Certain bacteria are not like mammals, birds, etc. When the oxygen runs out they don't die they switch their metabolism. In a sealed container that process is gradual and we could watch it happen on the gas analyzer data. The bacteria would start consuming organics and oxygen producing C02 but as the oxygen ran out it would switch and start consuming organics and CO2 producing methane and a few other hydrocarbons. Eventually the bacteria would consume all it could. We'd see that on the gas analyzer as methane had stopped being produced. After that we reintroduced air and with it oxygen. Since this step was abrupt rather than gradual the sudden introduction of oxygen would kill the bacteria. After a few days of aeration all that was left was sterile very high quality compost.
All Lomi is, is the first step in a process like that. Its just a smashing and grinding machine.
*Laughably you can do the same thing with an old blender or nutri-bullet for a lot less than $500. Just blend up your scraps with some water and put it all in a cloth bag. Squeeze out the water and/or hang it somewhere to drain like they do for cheese making. Put the drained off water on you plants because it will have all sorts of organics. Then put the mashed up stuff in a composter and let nature do its stuff.
That or spend $20-40 million and build a system like I worked on.
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@shiftyjesusfish There's a little known subject in that some call "planetary mechanics." Its sort of the first step in any ideas about terraforming. Its about raw numbers regarding how much stuff you need. Your not worried about the dynamics of the planet as it rotates about the sun (or a star) its just about how much stuff you need.
Mars has a surface area of 144,000,000 km If you consider it like very big ball with 144,000,000 cubes stuck on the outside year sure there's gaps but then some of those cubes will have mountains inside. In quite simple terms you can approximate that to 144,000,000 cubic kilometers of AIR if you want to make the surface of Mars habitable. That's just the most basic thing getting enough air.
Atmospheric air at sea level is about 1.2kg per meter cubed at around 20C. So that 1 kilometer or air around Mars would weigh something like:
1.2 kg/m3 * 144,000,000 km3 * 1,000,000,000 m3/km3 = 172,800,000,000,000,000 kilograms of air.
Or dropping some zeros 172,800,000 Mega tons of air.
To put that in perspective the entire world production of iron ore is about 3,000 Megatons a year. So its an extraordinary amount of air and its not simply locked up in rocks or ice. Were talking about going comet hunting for suitable sources of Oxygen and Nitrogen.
If your wondering why this might seem crazy you'll now know why we don't discuss these things much. It just confuses people, but the most basic thing to realise is that planets are bloody big objects.
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