In the fantastical, retro-futuristic steampunk world of Dynamo, a fleet of biogas-powered trains cruises autonomously, collecting trash along the way. Imagine what could have been! This is part of the upcoming work titled Dynamo, which will be available on Amazon.
In the 17th century, Jan Baptist Van Helmont observed that decaying organic matter produced flammable gases. In 1776, Alessandro Volta established a direct relationship between the amount of decaying organic material and the volume of gas produced. Sir Humphry Davy identified methane as the flammable gas in the early 1800s. By 1868, Bechamp, a student of Louis Pasteur, discovered that methane formation was a microbiological process. The first known anaerobic digester was built in 1859 in Bombay, India, using human waste to generate gas for lighting. By 1895, biogas from a sewage treatment plant in Exeter, England, was used to fuel street lamps. In 1937, S.V. Desai, a microbiologist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, conducted studies that led to the commissioning of a biogas plant which successfully generated power for several years.
A railway car with single-stage anaerobic digester, using the biogas to run its engine:
A train engine running on two-stage anaerobic digester:
A train running on biogas from a train of anaerobic digesters:
Adeerus Ghayan 