Communal, small scale Biogas systems - Thesis Presentation

My experiences have finally settled in, and a thesis-paper is starting to form. On October 8th, I will be presenting the results in a slightly original way (it's voluntary, so why not?).

An invitation including an abstract (in Swedish) can be downloaded at my drop.io site (password: biogas@lembang):

Feel free to join if you are anywhere close to Uppsala at the time. My friend Caroline will also be presenting her thesis on developing fruit dryers in rural Tanzania. Here are the details:


Thesis Presentations x 2
Thursday October 8
13.15 - 15.00
Ångströms Laboratorium, Room 4101
Uppsala

Hope to see you there!

A Singapore sling and a dash of MIT incredulousness

I am currently writing to you from a remote cabin in Northern Norway, normally housing MIT students working on their dissertations, doing research or taking courses at the MIT FabLab next door. FabLab is short for Fabrication Laboratory and the idea is to be able to create almost anyting in a small scale, user-adopted laboratory. It is quite surreal to be in such a remote area, and at the same time being able to connect to the internet with fiber optics, using the latest video conferencing technology and knowing that if you desperately need something constructed, there is a big chance the ShopBot router, Omax waterjetcutter and the Modella minimill in the house next door, can get the job done. There are FabLabs in rural India, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Iceland, a number of places in the US and here in Norway on the Lyngen peninsula. You can read more about the Norwegian Fablab here.


MIT FabLab Norway was built and is run by a local sheep farmer and art history Professor. MIT first contacted him due to the fact that he was putting GPS equipment on his sheep and recording physiological data.

I am here in Norway with my ski-touring friends Aaron, Niclas and Beau. For some great pictures from my friends adventures, check out Niclas photo-blog. I am however spending most of my time in and around the cabin, for a few reasons. First of all, I am starting to write my thesis and aiming to complete it in a little more than a month, and secondly the happy ending of my last entry has a hair-raising, nail-biting continuation that has left me slightly unfit for strenuous mountain climbs...


Lyngen peninsula.

There is a Swedish expression - don't holler hello before you have crossed the stream - which I have come to take very much to heart lately. After going back to work in Cicalung for a few days I started noticing the skin around my wound was getting redder and redder, thicker and thicker, faster and faster. Going in for a check up at the hospital, getting a few wrong diagnoses, a CT-scan and an ultra-sound, the doctors finally diagnosed me as having Cellulitis. Cellulitis is a deep skin infection (not to be confused with cellulites!). After recieving medical reports from my Indonesian hospital that indicated a slight lack of judgement and resources in terms of the correct and sufficient amount of antibiotics, my insurance company decided to fly me to Singapore.

Singapore health care was even better than I had anticipated. Knowledgeable doctors, working in large interdisciplinary teams and taking their time with the patients. My mother, no longer able to deal with my continuing health ordeals from a far, came down and accompanied me. Great to have some time together and have time to catch up, even thought the circumstances where a bit unusual. After 10 days of IV-antibiotics they felt safe sending me back home to Sweden.


The view from my hospital window at Singapore General Hospital.

Thanks to my amazing friends and colleagues in Indonesia, the experiments and empirical research that I needed for my thesis have been completed without me. Thank you Wawa, Yono, and the rest of the Biogas team for doing my work while I was in the hospital, both in Indonesia and in Singapore! By the next entry, I will hopefully have a first draft of my thesis finished and let you have a peek.

Incisions and losses

Well, I finally ran out of luck. Life took a turn for the worse. A series of most unfortunate events. Anyway you put it, the last two weeks have in some ways been more suboptimal than the others.

It all started with an unfortunate incision made into our newly installed multi-family prototype digester. The incision was made by a foot and happened very quickly - I was suddenly holding the person connected to the foot in my arms and helping her out of the smelly interior.

The week continued with the loss of my wallet. It ended with, what I thought, would be a short trip to the hospital, to investigate some newly acquired stomach pains and fever chills. I was quickly diagnosed with appendicitis and was, just a few hours later, lying in morphine induced relaxation mode on the operating table. After another incision and extraction, I was an appendix poorer, but very happy to have it over with. I got a high fever for the next few days and was worrying a bit when the doctors starting debating if it might be Dengue, Typhoid or Malaria, that I might be suffering from. Turns out it was probably just an infection caused by infectious tissue still left in my body or that popped in during the operation. I have now tried three types of Indonesian antibiotics and one of them seemed to work. And boy are they strong.



Daily shower routine, taken in bed.

Enough of the health-talk. I have been completely surrounded by helpful, caring and cheerful friends during my stay here at the hospital. My room became somewhat of a social gathering place and even a number of work-related meetings, where held in the couch next to my bed. I was brought flowers, sweets, fresh fruits, DVD's, books and of course good company. Albeit the great attention and care I've been getting here at the hospital, I am really looking forward to leaving. I will be picked up and dismissed (or whatever the term is) within an hour.

To complete the story and bring you to the happy ending, the digester with the great hole was operated on March 18. Thanks to Wawa's nimble fingers it has reached full recovery. I am maybe one week away from stabilisation. Hopefully this will be enough time to complete what I came here to do. My wallet is still lost somewhere in the wilderness of Lembang or in the urban jungle of Bandung. Happy enough ending for me.


Pre-op. preparations

Nice and tigth seal. Can you figure out how it was done? Not so easy, eh?

New sounds, fried banana, and the cycle of life

My composter has been invaded by ants. Apparently this happens if you load it infrequently, or add a bunch of sweet things, like watermelon. There is an indonesian saying: Ada gula, ada semut (There is sugar, there is ant). So I spent the morning fishing watermelon pieces out of my composter and adding yet another ant-colony to the backyard of my house. Ants are extremely fascinating by the way. There are ants who live underwater, ants that can direct the way they fall, ants that build rafts, ants that herd caterpillars (they lead them to feeding areas in the daytime and bring them back to the anthill at night and then massage them so they excrete delicious honeydew). As if this wasn't enough, they thrive in almost all ecosystems (save marine and arctic ones) and are believed to constitute around 25 % of the animal terrestial biomass! Wikipedias ant-page is very entertaining...



Learning new languages and being here in Indonesia, there are a lot of new sounds in and around my head at the moment. Here are a few songs that I've been humming lately:

Ojeg Cunihin - Motorcycle-taxi playboy (sundanese pop song)
Aduh bagja Pisan (Wow I'm very happy)
Narik ojeg ngalarisan (I'm bringing my first ojeg passenger)
Nutumpakna guelis pisan (A passenger very beautiful)
Hate sok seseredetan (My heart is beating fast)
Keur Kasalameutan (For safety...)
Nuguelis kedah nyeupeungan (beautiful, grab on to me)

Tikus Kantor - Office mouse
Iwan Fals is indonesias bob dylan, without the harmonica.

Bubuy Bulan (trad. Sundanese song)
A song that I think is about various ways to cook celestial bodies (e.g. the moon, the sun and the stars), but I could be wrong. Also the video is really funny.

Speaking about cooking, here are some of the many things that I have enjoyed running through my body the last few months:

Spicy sambal peanut sauce, fried green beans, yellow rice, brown rice, fried banana (yes, I really do like it!), bala-bala (fried vegetable cakes), fried tempeh, fried noodles (yes, very many things are fried), gorengan (fried flour chips), fresh milk with cane sugar and of course everything that Wawa's mother cooks (I don't think I have had the same meal twice, and every time it is just as delicious).


Listening to a foreigner trying to sing Ojeg , is much more interesting than going to school...

Cicalung dangdut session

Just one of the many delicious meals with Wawa and his family

A quick run to town

A massive thunderstorm has just pulled in over Bandung, so I am writing this on my unconnected lap-top and will upload it in a while. I have spent the last few days in Cicalung. The project is moving along well. I just finished a presentation that I will be doing next week for my examiner Kjell Aleklett and his research group Global Energy Systems. Take a look at it here if you are interested to see the latest transformation of my thesis project (password: biogas@lembang).

Matt and Meghan have come and gone. We did a lot of exploring by foot, played a bunch of cribbage, exchanged books and made guacamole. It was very nice to have them here and it made me feel just a bit more at home than before (nothing better than having guests to boost you perception of knowing a place). I guess they are now somewhere east of here, maybe between Bali and Lombok. Meghan is writing a blog (and Matt is writing some of the captions to the photos) where I am sure a bunch of photos from their visit will appear shortly. I have left my camera at home for the last week as Meghan seemed happy to do the shooting.

I am on my way back to Cicalung this afternoon (I just popped down to Bandung for some clean clothes and a few hours or so of internet). Yono is coming by to pick me up fairly soon so I better get my stuff together.

Pasir Angling

Tuesday morning here in Bandung. I have just finished my breakfast consisting of oatmeal with raisins and raw cane sugar along with some green tea. The sun is shining in through my window. Clouds are covering most of Bandung but the peaks on the crater-rim are still bathed in the morning light. The plan for the day is to go up to Cicalung and figure out a way to measure gas production from Wawa's large scale system. Before that, I am meeting Rima, one of the volunteers at YPBB, who will be helping out to make an Indonesian-English Biogas dictionary and a curriculum for teaching english to the biogas team in Cicalung!

This past weekend, I took part in my first biogas system installation in a village called Pasir Angling. It is much more remote than the other villages in the area and is best reached on foot. A large installation team consisting of Yono, Wawa, Wawas young crew of biogas technicians and myself, set out for Pasir Angling on Saturday morning. We spent three full days installing two new systems in the village. Ususally the installations are quicker and require less people but since the design of both digesters where new (one vertical cylinder and one short and fat horizontal one), there where several technical hurdles that had to be overcome. Heavy afternoon rains also made it more difficult. Working from early morning to way past dark, it was amazing to see the commitment and enthusiasm from the team, that in turn was reflected back by the active and strong participation of the many villagers, who took part in the installation. Many of the them are now interested in building their own systems (hopefully by themselves but with the possibility of support if they need it).

Tomorrow is an exciting day. My very good friend Matt from California and his girlfriend Meghan are arriving in the morning. They have been traveling around South East Asia for the last 6 months and decided to stop by and visit before they make their way back to the states. I am working on a plan to integrate their visit with my tight schedule. I am sure I will be able to put them to work and hopefully add a new dimension to their travels.


The horizontal digester with mixer, aka "The Fat One".

At around 5 m3 volume, this digester will provide biogas for the cooking needs of the family of the RW of Pasir Angling (the local community leader). The biogas will replace fuelwood and fossil fuel based cooking fuels such as kerosene and LPG. In reality however, a hybrid system is often used.

Biogas team in action. Yono and Wawa work together to open the gas valve.

The RW of Pasir Angling during installation.

Awan is heavily supervised while preparing the mixer for the Fat One.


Rain, thunder and lightning, every day, 3 o'clock.

Checking for leaks in the piping system with a newly constructed portable manometer. On the left is a pressure valve and safety valve integrated into the same plastic bottle (Designed by Wawa). The pressure in the digester is regulated by the water level in the bottle and the safety valve makes sure that the pressure never becomes higher than the material strength of the plastic used for the digester.

Mud, rain and late nigths - but the digester is installed!

Hanging out (Nongkrong in Sundanese) in the Warung (café/store) in Cicalung and slightly delaying the departure to Pasir Angling. Here we are chatting about family, directions and noses. They find it strange that I don't have brothers or sisters, wonder how far it is to Sweden and think I have the longest nose you could possibly imagine.

Cicalung

I have spent the last few days in my new favorite spot in Indonesia - Cicalung. Cicalung is a small village that is perched high upon a flat-top ridge under the volcano of Tangkuban Perahu (The overturned boat). There is a long and interesting Sundanese legend behind this name. Check it out online if you want. I will just tell you that it involves fathers turning into dogs, mothers staying forever young, and sons falling madly in love with the wrong woman..

PESAT (The foundation for the development of community of self support) is an organisation that is running the biogas program together with YPBB. A few years back, they helped Cicalung install a water system that pumps water from a nearby spring, up the very steep slopes, to the village. My new colleague and friend Wawa, became the local technician of the project. In cooperation with Yono (my supervisor at YPBB), Wawa has now gone on to work with biogas systems, including the installation of digesters, maintenance work and repairs, construction of biogas stoves, experiments, employing local youth and the list goes on and on... It is in Cicalung, just down the road from Wawa's house, that the experimental digestersthat I am working with, have been built. We started measurements this week, which we will be running for the next 30 days. At the same time, multi-family systems will be installed in two different villages, and a prototype for these systems will be built in Cicalung. Lots of exciting things going on in other words!

Yono and Wawa in Cicalung

Experiment set-up: Pressure and safety valves for the digesters.

Water displacement apparatus and pump for measuring gas production.

Checking the CO2 content of Wawa's biogas - Around 37%. Not too bad.
Getting up at 6 in the morning, fetching cow manure, filling the digesters, taking measurements, planning the next installations and visiting the surrounding villages, the days are long and filled with activity. Somehow, however, there is absolutely no stress present and there is plenty of time for playing chess, guitar, walks, hanging out by the window cafés drinking Bandrek (a local drink made of ginger, milk and young coconut) and chatting with people (Almost only in Indonesian by now, with a few english, spanish and swedish words thrown in here and there). I feel right at home in the house of Wawa's parents, being fed delicious food twice as often as I feed myself in Sweden, and being warmly accepted into their daily life.

Daily Manure pick-up.

Stirring the soup before pulling the plug and filling the digester. The bambu cover is for chicken crossing.

Fully loaded gas holder outside the kitchen door. The weights are used to increase the pressure.

Catur! I actually wonthis one.
There is so much more that I could scribble down, but I will let pictures do the rest of the talking this time. I am off to the local market to get some food and inspiration. I have invited everyone for dinner tomorrow night and promised an Indoswedish cuisine which will require some imagination on my part.

Not many trees remain in the area around Lembang. The ones that do are often providing shade for graveyards as in the picture.

Cow manure is often just left next to the cow shed to slowly be drained away b y rain.

Lots and lots of manure and limited space.

Cows and many other animlas are kept penned in small spaces like this cow in Cicalung. Although the meat and dairy industry in other parts of the world may be far worse, it is not fun to see the clear unhappiness of the animals.

The use of pesticides is widespread. This pesticide spreader was constructed in the same shop that Wawa makes biogas stoves.

Birds... no! guess again and look closer

Indonesian Rhapsody

The daily afternoon rain is drowning out the prayer calls from the mosque just across the street from my new home, here in northern Bandung, Western Java, Indonesia. These first two weeks have been filled to the brim with activities, new friends and new impressions.

Grocery Store, Cafe, DVD shop and Tailor - all on my street Jalan Bangbayang.

View from my roof top to the east.

Last night I went to a dinner at the house of my initial friends and connection here in Indonesia, Any and David. They live with their adorable daughter Nira in eastern Bandung, on a mountainside with a great view over the ancient crater bowl that now is jam-packed with humans and human constructions. Bandung is one of the most densely populated regions in Asia and has the highest growth rate of all urban areas in Indonesia - A very challenging place to be working with environmental education and social transformation. David runs an NGO that focuses on environmental education with programs ranging from “nature-immersion” (where urbanites are taken into nature) to the construction and diffusion of rural biogas plants. Any has started her own organisation focusing on training and facilitation processes of social transformation. They are now looking for land to build an eco-village and “immersion-center” where they plan to live and work together with their friends.

Work, work, work in the djungle. David (in white t-shirt) and colleagues at a 4 day, intensive annual meeting in the mountains south of Bandung this past weekend.

Being the only tall, blond, long-noosed person in my neighbourhood I have very quickly become the talk of the town. Walking down the street I get more smiles and greetings than I have got in a lifetime in Sweden and the US. The other day I was in a traditional market several km away from my house and was asked if I was “bule” (white foreigner) Isak that lives up the road! Chess is played everywhere and very well so I am getting my fair share of intellectual clobbering every week from the street masters. I play soccer with Isan, Yusep, Mahmoud and the other children on my street. They are my mentors in the Indonesian language which I am picking up slowly but steadily. However, misinterpretations and misunderstanding abound. On my first day in Bandung I went for a hike to a waterfall and found a sign with the text WC/Mushola. Naturally my interpretation was that Mushola is the Indonesian word for toilet. The following day I was at a meeting with my new colleagues and asked where the “Mushola” was. A bit perplexed they showed me the room and it took me a few moments to realize that this was no toilet but a Muslim prayer-room! Apparently toilet and prayer rooms are often situated in the same place – a phenomena no one has been able to explain to me as of yet.

My new team mates and friends outside my house.

What is Mushola?

For those of you who don’t know, and those of you who have forgotten, I am here to do my field-work and research for my Masters thesis on small scale rural biogas technology. I am working with two local organisations, local technicians and dairy farmers in villages north of Bandung. The biogas systems installed utilize cow manure to produce biogas for cooking and organic fertilizer, through anaerobic digestion. The design used is often referred to as the plastic-bag model and is constructed using locally available material (such as PE plastic, PVC pipes, plastic water bottles etc.). The capital cost is low enough for the cow-farmers to afford to invest in the system without financial aid or government subsidies (not more than 100 USD for a family-sized system). After a recent discussion with my new colleagues here in Indonesia, I will be focusing my efforts on developing an appropriate design for a multi-family system, making it possible for villagers without cows of their own, to also have biogas. I will also have a number of volunteers helping me with data collection etc. If you want to get a better idea of what I will be doing in the coming month, read the short invitation to volunteers that I wrote today, which can be found below.

Three generations of cooking technology. Wood stove, LPG stove and a biogas stove built by local technician and genius Wawa.

Village meeting to introduce biogas technology to cow farmers in Cireyod. This is probably where the multi-family system I am designing will be installed.

I’m now off to a birthday party for my neighbour. I have prepared a Sangria with a little bit of everything and have high hopes to learn some Indonesian Dangdut tunes (Indonesian country) from her musician friends that are supposed to be there.

Short project introduction

Invitation to join research project on biogas in Lembang:

A cooperation between YPBB, PESAT and Uppsala Technical University, Sweden.

With over 5000 dairy farmers and around 15000 cows in and around Lembang, the large amount of cow manure produced is a major sanitary and waste issue. At the same time it is also a largely underused resource. With increasing prices of fossil fuel based cooking fuels and chemical fertilizers, simple and cheap biogas technology can supply both a sustainable cooking fuel and high quality organic fertilizer.

The amount of cow manure produced from one dairy cow is enough to fulfil the cooking needs of one family. A number of family-sized biogas systems have been installed in villages around Lembang. Since most dairy farmers own more than one cow and hence have more than enough cow manure for their own cooking needs, a multi-family system that can provide biogas for up to four families is being developed.

A research project to develop and improve the design of small-scale polyethylene biogas systems has been initiated in the village of Wangunharja. A number of experimental biodigesters have been constructed and measurements will commence shortly. A prototype for the multi-family system is also being constructed and will provide useful information for the installation of the first multi-family system (preliminary installation date in March).

The project will give you a chance to gain practical experience in conducting field research for biogas technology. Daily measurements will be conducted during the coming weeks on the experimental digesters. Gas production, gas pressure, gas quality (methane content), fertilizer quality of the effluent and air temperature are some of the parameters that will be measured in the field. Instruments for the field measurements of these parameters are provided and in some cases have been built. The work entails conducting structured measurements and data collection in cooperation with local technicians, YPBB staff and an engineering student from Sweden - doing his masters thesis on biogas here in Lembang. Communication skills in English are an advantage and can be useful for translation purposes. Assistance in constructing and conducting experiments on the multi-family system prototype will also be needed.