Research

Today I went to the Denver Public Library and got three books on renewable energy. One of them had a specific lean towards Brazilian policies and use of ethanol as a renewable. I will look over these for biological and environmental information on our topic.

And the horses are off...

We met to begin our research today. The topic has been refined from biofuels in general down to sugarcane use in Brazil. We found lots of information on the biological processes involved in obtaining remaining energy from dead plant cells, but still need to find out more info about the environmental impacts.

Mo Progress

We met for three hours wednesday to work on our project. We have ordered the wicks that we will be using as well as a thermometer to measure the change in temperature which thus corresponds to the maximum power output of the fuels. We will test vegetable oil and our version of biofuel. We decided against doing waste vegetabl oil (i.e. after it had been used to cook). We will have to wait for materials to arive, but should have the experiment conducted in a couple of weeks. So long for now.

New Plan

I will now be working in a new group with Sarah, Ido, and Amaya. We will be testing the energy efficiency between biofuel and other fuels. Specifically we will test biodeisel and vegetable oil. Sounds fun. We will need a kerosene lamp for this experiment.

Blog #1

We finally got the topic chosen for our G4. We will test the energy content of plants. It's still pretty open at this point, but were hoping to burn them! Then we can see how much they heat water up. This actually sounds pretty useful if I ever end up lost in the wild. Peace.