An Overview of the Efficiency of Human Waste Pyrolysis Using Concentrated Solar Power

As sanitation poses a major issue for much of the developing world, a sustainable solution must be implemented to handle these issues. The Sol-Char Sanitation approach takes concentrated solar energy to disinfect, dry, and pyrolyze waste to create an easily usable solid fuel. This is done through parabolic sunlight concentrators which concentrate the light into fiber optic cables. These cables transmit the light to the reactor which absorbs the light.  Using a CCD camera, flux maps were obtained showing relative intensity of the concentrated solar power along the optical train. These images showed the majority of the light was being captured at each inlet along the optical track, while also showing some oddities in the optics such as slight size differences and a relatively elliptical focused image at the reflected focal point. The average optical efficiency was found to be 0.28 +/- 0.01 through various on-sun power testing, while the reactor efficiency was found to be 0.72 +/- 0.02 from an on-sun water boiling test.