A bubble-maker has won a £250,000 prize from the Royal Society for its ability to transform the cost and effectiveness of growing algae for biofuel, treating sewage and cooling computers.
The Y-shaped device delivers tiny but perfectly formed bubbles by mimicking the way children blow bubbles. Its inventor, Prof Will Zimmerman, a chemical engineer at the University of Sheffield, explained: "If you blow slowly and steadily, you blow a big bubble, but we use our fluidic oscillator to blow short puffs and make small bubbles."
The device has been used in field trials to produce algae from the exhaust gas from chimneys at the steel maker Corus. Zimmerman said that as well as efficiently delivering carbon dioxide bubbles to feed the algae, the small bubbles crucially - unlike larger ones - carry away waste oxygen and allow 100% of the algae to survive.
Ben Graziano, Carbon Trust manager of its algae biofuels challenge, said: "There has been a lot of hype in this area and we think algal biofuels are 10 years from being commercialised, as most of the expertise is in the laboratory at the moment. But biofuel from algae can reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly better than many existing biofuels, and can be sustainable as they don't need arable land."
The oil giant ExxonMobil is making a $600m (£376m) investment in algae biofuels, working with the human genome decoder Craig Venter to engineer algae to produce more oil. Shell has also invested in the technology.
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Source: Guardian online