A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt. About the size of a standard paperback book, the completely soil-powered technology could fuel underground sensors used in precision agriculture and green infrastruct

Northwestern University researchers have introduced a soil-microbe-powered fuel cell, significantly outperforming similar technologies and providing a sustainable solution for powering low-energy devices.

  • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    37·
    5 months ago

    They claim “68 times more than required to operate the sensors”, then mention a sensor to measure soil moisture.

    A basic soil moisture sensor, like say, the ones I have stacked on a shelf here, will work on 2 AA batteries. It runs on 2V at 10mA. So that’s 20 milliWatts, and in willing to be a fair bit of that goes into the electronics that make a red, green or orange led light up at certain moisture levels, and the bit that beeps when below a certain level.

    Still, this sets something of an upper limit at 1.3W, or maybe 680 mA? Those seem rather high, so I’m betting their moisture sensor is a bit more delicate than my model. It depends on the size and number of cells though.

    • muntedcrocodile@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      5 months ago

      Im pretty sure most soil moisture measurment devices just measure the capacitance to measure dielectric permittivity. U can design such a setup to use any arbitrary amount of power depending how close the electrodes are rogether etc etc.

    • Willie@kbin.social
      5·
      5 months ago

      Yeah, I am imagining the soil moisture things from the garden store, with the little needle gauge thing, that takes so little power that there’s no battery slot. I feel like the amount of power this thing makes is extremely low.