A new set of research is just beginning in the resilient home program and it’s going to be my project over the summer. I’ll start at the inspiration..
Badger Army Arsenal in Baraboo, WI was used to make rocket propellant, ball powder and a few other military use materials. The Arsenal is 7000 acres, contains 1,307 buildings and was in use between about 1940 to 1977. There is 4 million board feet of lumber in the largest 77 buildings alone!! The floors of many of the buildings are lead on top of wood (to prevent sparks when things were dropped).
In the mid 90s research was carried out to attempt to figure out if it could be deconstructed and the timber reused elsewhere..this is where things get a bit dangerous. It turns out that a lot of nitro cellulose and other high explosives had worked their way into the timbers making all of the structures pretty explosive. Now this is where we get to come in! This has brought up the idea by Dr.Dave Tilotta (one of the original scientists who tested the base, and my advisor) to see if we can gasify the wood and in turn create syngas, ethanol, and even gasoline from all of this waste material.
For this we will be using Ramen spectroscopy to analyze what exactly is in the wood (no one currently does this so we have to come up with the technology on our own) and then do research to see if we can gasify it safely and in an environmentally friendly way. If this research works out waste lumber from old buildings everywhere can be used this way (there are billions of board feet in old buildings out there). If we can do it with the wood at this base we can do it with wood from anywhere.
We will also begin building our own gasifier with the help of the Research Triangle, this should be absurdly fun! Hopefully we can make some waves with this research!
(Image 1 and 2 Dr Tilotta, Image 3 worldchanging.com)
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