Generating Electrical Power From Sugar

Taking care of your health just got easier, thanks to my sponsor Zocdoc — start here at: https://zocdoc.com/hyperspace In this video I'll demonstrate how to generate electrical power from sugar, albeit in a very roundabout way. Sugar is fermented with yeast to turn into a 10-15% solution of ethanol, and the solution is concentrated by fractional distillation to about 93% to use as fuel in an engine. The engine is a 212cc 4-stroke that has its carburetor modified by drilling out the main jet to increase the area by about 50% to burn the ethanol at the proper fuel-air ratio. A brushless motor is connected to the output shaft of the engine to produce 3-phase alternating current. The 3-phase AC is rectified and comes out to about 12-18 volts DC depending on the throttle setting of the engine. The low voltage, high current DC can then be used for a variety of different DC applications, or connected to an inverter to make 120V 60-hz AC. The advantage of this setup is that it doesn't need a governor to regulate the engine RPM to maintain 60hz needed for AC appliances. The cost to produce the ethanol (including the energy required for fractional distillation) was just under 10 dollars per gallon, which is a lot higher than the 4-6 dollars per gallon that gasoline in the US costs at the time of making this video. It's also less energy dense than gasoline. However, this is the cost to do it at a micro homemade DIY scale, and doing it at a larger scale would probably be competitive with gasoline (especially if you grew your own feedstock like sugarcane or corn). In theory, an engine designed for ethanol could make up for the lower energy density by using a higher compression ratio than gasoline, since the octane rating of ethanol is about 109. Also, an ethanol-burning engine would need to have seals and O-rings made of a material like teflon or something similarly chemically resistant because Ethanol has a tendency to attack rubber. Ethanol is also hygroscopic, so its tendency to attract moisture can lead to engine corrosion. The distiller is an 8-liter aluminum pressure cooker with a hole drilled in the lid to fit a bulkhead fitting for a 1-1/2 inch female NPT thread. The heater is a 1kW electric heater plate with a 555-timer controlled solid state relay to vary the duty cycle for fine tuning the heat. The reflux column is a 48x1-1/2 inch copper pipe packed tightly with rolls of copper mesh. It also has a dephlegmator at the top, but I found that it wasn't neccesary to use it to reach 93-95% concentration from the output. The heater starts off at about 900W to heat up the low-concentration alcohol, and once boiling begins, it's dialed back to about 250-300W to maximize the output concentration. At an energy cost of 0.12 USD per kWh it costs me 1.17 USD per gallon in energy to do the distillation. This could probably be improved a lot with good insulation and a heater inside the boiler vessel itself. If you have waste fruit or grain, this would be a good backup option for energy production, especially in an off-grid situation during times when solar or wind energy isn't available. Music Used: Take Me Home, Country Roads - Otamatone & Kazoo Cover by    / @otamazoo   (opening scene)