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Our mission for Senior Design was to design and build a continuous composter that enables RIT to more readily recycle food waste—a crucial step towards a carbon and waste neutral campus by 2030. Currently, RIT sends about 1.3 tons of food waste to a bio digester over 20 miles away. As a proof of concept, a portion of that waste can be processed in our black soldier fly (BSF) composter on campus. The black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) are able to consume a wide variety of organic material, including meat and oil, which worm composting systems are unable to handle. By using BSFL, we are creating a great solution for repurposing excess food from RIT students, allowing the compost to be used in the campus gardens. Black Soldier Fly Composter Top Engineering Requirements Pass/ Fail Top Customer Requirements Pass/ Fail Composter fits within 10' x 12' footprint Pass Provide a variable sized feeding area Pass Exit ramps can handle a mass of 21,000 larvae at a time or 5% of total population Pass Allow/provide route for larvae to migrate for pupation Pass Greater than or equal to 13 pound or 5 gallon of compost processed per day In Progress Intake capacity of composter is about what can be dumped from a five pound bucket by a single operator In Progress Subsystems & Fabrication Composting Process Frass Removal Special thanks to: Sarah Brownell Dawn Carter Chris Liebfried Brian Thorn Enid Cardinal River Road Research RIT Machine Shop The Construct Conclusions & Future Implications: The completed composter with accompanying Black Soldier Fly Larvae is capable of handling 40 kg of food waste per day while being operated by one person. In future years, RIT hopes to include composting as one method of disposal for all food waste the campus creates. If we were to upscale our design to accomodate all the food waste currently shipped to the bio digester the dimensions would need to be 20 feet high and 17 ft in diameter Performance vs Requirements Variable Sized Feeding Area: ● Measures 1.25ft 2 to 5.07 ft 2 ● Met 83% of required SA Larvae Migration*: ● %Migrated Larvae escaped ○ Allowed: 10% ○ Actual: 3% Compost Processing**: ● 17 kg per day capability ● Met requirement of 10.2 kg Walter Markowski Haley Avery Jason Kuang Morgan Kline Maddy Lockwood Josh Enico P19422 The frame pictured above was constructed with wood. The cone of the body was constructed with FRP The swim lanes were created by placing wooden triangles coated with fiberglass cloth and resin . The entire inside of the body was coated with pond liner. The removal system uses an auger with a shaft up through the middle of the cone. A pipe is then used as a handle to turn the auger and remove frass out the bottom of the cone. Frame and Body Eggs Larvae Pupae Fly Final Assembled Composter *Data from preliminary testing **Based on scaling up of preliminary test
