Poo-powered race car created by students could soon be on the tracks
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Students at the University of Warwick are taking the words s**t car to whole new heights, with a new poo-powered motorsports car that runs on hydrogen extracted from sewage (human waste, FYI). The ground-breaking sewage-powered Waste2Race Le Mans prototype car was made from a selection of spare and unused parts, set to take on new ground by attempting to break a land speed record.
With hopes that the car will be up and running later on this year, we could even see it on the tracks one day - though we may not see Lewis Hamilton racing off with one of them any time soon. “We aren't certain how fast it will go but it'll have plenty of power,” Dr James Meredith, chief engineer at the University Of Warwick tells The Mirror.
“There’s some really impressive hydrogen records out there, so we don't know exactly which record we’ll go for. We don't know whether it'll be related to acceleration or top speed or something else. We're going to slightly reserve judgement on exactly which record we're going for, but certainly we think the performance will be there to get something exciting.”.
While sewage might not seem like a natural choice to run a car, it has benefits that can be harnessed for clean energy. The car will specifically use hydrogen that is a by-product of Wastewater Fuels treatment technology being trialled at Severn Trent.
“If you take sewage and you put it into a microbial electrolysis cell, essentially you are growing microbes on a carbon substrate. Those microbes, in the process of consuming the sewage, produce hydrogen as a by-product. If you can do this process at scale, you can actually consume the sewage and produce this hydrogen as a by-product. It’s a very green hydrogen you get, which is fantastic,” explains Dr Meredith.
