New Fuel Idea Goes Up in Smoke

Not every scientific experiment comes out like it’s supposed to.

The so-called “bio-fuel” cell that budding engineers at Harvey Mudd College tried to produce is proof of that.

As a class project, the Claremont students set out to develop an alternative fuel supply for peasants who live in a Guatemalan mountain village where firewood is scarce. The technique: burning a self-renewing resource--human-produced solid waste.

But in the end, the experiment was a flop, the youngsters acknowledged as Rafael Salazar, consul general of Guatemala, visited the campus Monday to see the results of the research.

The design effort was the quirkiest of a dozen classroom projects undertaken this spring to make lives easier for villagers in tiny San Jose Mas Alla, a hamlet nestled 7,000 feet up in the highlands of Guatemala.

More conventional ideas proposed by freshmen students included hydroelectric generators built from conventional bicycle parts, improved oil lamps constructed from tin cans, easy-to-use backpacks made from plastic milk crates and easy-to-make devices to collect drinking water from fog.

The even simpler-sounding bio-fuel proposal was eliminated at the last minute Monday because of what might be called a manufacturing problem.

As part of their research into BTUs and burn rates, the fuel researchers decided to try to duplicate villagers’ diets as they produced the human fuel. That way, they reasoned, test-fuel samples would accurately reflect the resources available in San Jose Mas Alla.

The designated guinea pig, project team leader Jeff Bogdanovich, 19, of Cupertino, agreed to eat only beans, white rice and tortillas for a week.

What happened? “I got constipated,” Bogdanovich said.

No fuel, no experiment.

Teammates Alex Valentine, Simon Huynh, Chris Tyler and Frank Shaw were disappointed.

The idea came during a classroom brainstorming session, explained Huynh, 19.

“We were trying to keep ourselves pretty open,” Huynh said.

Tyler, 18, said: “My gut reaction when we first started brainstorming it was ‘yeeech.’ But the Plains Indians burned buffalo chips for fuel. You can’t give up on something just because of a gut reaction.”

Ever the diplomat, Salazar praised the students’ creativity.

“Introducing new technologies to a culture is difficult,” he said. “Whether successful or not, I’m very much appreciative of the students’ great efforts.”

As a fallback project, the fuel team built a concrete cooking oven that villagers can use in their huts. But the main problem with it, they acknowledged, is the stove’s weight: 700 pounds.

Try carrying that up a mountain trail in a milk crate backpack.