A Self-Powered PMFC-Based Wireless Sensor Node for Smart City Applications

Abstract

Long power wide area networks (LPWAN) systems play an important role in monitoring environmental conditions for smart cities applications. With the development of Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN), and energy harvesting devices, ultra-low power sensor nodes (SNs) are able to collect and monitor the information for environmental protection, urban planning, and risk prevention. This paper presents a WSN of self-powered IoT SNs energetically autonomous using Plant Microbial Fuel Cells (PMFCs). An energy harvesting device has been adapted with the PMFC to enable a batteryless operation of the SN providing power supply to the sensor network. The low-power communication feature of the SN network is used to monitor the environmental data with a dynamic power management strategy successfully designed for the PMFC-based LoRa sensor node. Environmental data of ozone (O3) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are monitored in real time through a web application providing IoT cloud services with security and privacy protocols.

Bio‐fuel cell for medical device energy system: A review

“…In addition, fuel cells have been implemented for the function of the breath alcohol checker 140 . Figure 17 shows the structure of a fuel cell detector comprising electrodes of platinum and acidic porous electrolytes layer 142 . As the oxidation process is carried out for alcohol in the air exhaled from the nose, it releases acetic acid and water as output products, which in turn will produce a voltage parallel to the concentration of alcohol.…”

Providing Energy Self-Sufficiency to LoRaWAN Nodes by Means of Thermoelectric Generators (TEGs)-Based Energy Harvesting

“…This feature, together with the large availability of low-cost hardware components and the excellent performances in terms of receiver sensitivity (up to −140 dBm), which results in extremely large transmission ranges (up to 20 km in rural areas), have paved the way to the vast diffusion of this technology and thus to its adoption also in this research work. In order to provide LoRaWAN nodes with energy self-sufficiency, several energy-harvesting techniques have been tested, from common solar cells [3] to more peculiar microbial fuel cells [4] or sea waves motion [5]. TEGs have also been employed in a number of contributions, mainly focusing however on the actual application scenario.…”

Enhancement of bioelectric parameters of multi-electrode plant–microbial fuel cells by combining of serial and parallel connection

“…Carbon granules/carbon felt, graphite felt/carbon polytetrafluorethylene coated and carbon fibers felt/granular activated carbon were designed for PMFC (Hubenova and Mitov 2012;Kouzuma et al 2013;Tapia et al 2018). Only a few scientific groups have explored other non-carbon materials such as carbon fibers/stainless steel (Bombelli et al 2013), granular activated carbon/stainless steel with granular activated carbon (Liu et al 2013), copper spiral/zinc network (Ayala-Ruiz et al 2019;de la Rosa et al 2019) and granular activated carbon/ platinum-coated carbon cathode (Oodally et al 2019).…”

“…Combination of carbon and non-carbon electrode materials in the PMFC was not inferior to carbon electrodes in terms of electrical productivity and remains insufficient studied. Application of PMFC with copper/zinc electrodes pair was shown for powering devices with low energy consumption (Ayala-Ruiz et al 2019;de la Rosa et al 2019); therefore, the study of new electrode materials presented is of considerable interest. In order to improve the performance of PMFC technology, it is necessary to search for a new and at the same time cost-efficient electrode materials, which can have a significant impact on the obtained bioelectricity parameters (Rabaey and Verstraete 2005;Cheng et al 2006).…”