Harvest Energy from the Water

Abstract

Water quality data is incredibly important and valuable, but its acquisition is not always trivial. A promising solution is to distribute a wireless sensor network in water to measure and collect the data; however, a drawback exists in that the batteries of the system must be replaced or recharged after being exhausted. To mitigate this issue, we designed a self-sustained water quality sensing system that is powered by renewable bioenergy generated from microbial fuel cells (MFCs). MFCs collect the energy released from native magnesium oxidizing microorganisms (MOMs) that are abundant in natural waters. The proposed energy-harvesting technology is environmentally friendly and can provide maintenance-free power to sensors for several years. Despite these benefits, an MFC can only provide microwatt-level power that is not sufficient to continuously power a sensor. To address this issue, we designed a power management module to accumulate energy when the input voltage is as low as 0.33V. We also proposed a radio-frequency (RF) activation technique to remotely activate sensors that otherwise are switched off in default. With this innovative technique, a sensor’s energy consumption in sleep mode can be completely avoided. Additionally, this design can enable on-demand data acquisitions from sensors. We implement the proposed system and evaluate its performance in a stream. In 3-month field experiments, we find the system is able to reliably collect water quality data and is robust to environment changes.

Agriculture 4.0: An Implementation Framework for Food Security Attainment in Nigeria’s Post-Covid-19 Era

“…Another research trend to solve this problem is harvesting energy from the environment (Ambient energy harvesting). Ambient energy can be harvested from rivers, fluid flow [89], from the movement of the train [90], and ground surface [91]. Farmers can install agricultural IoT in indoor greenhouses, outdoor farmlands, underground areas, and even underwater.…”

Microbial fuel cells for in-field water quality monitoring

“…The use of a sacricial anode, based either on metals (like Mn) 76 or solid electrolytes, 32,77 can guarantee stable and autonomous operation of MFC sensors for several months. For example, a stable power production of 111 and 105 mW over 2.5 months was achieved with semi-solid gelatine and alginate substrates in an MFC, in lab-bench experiments.…”

“…The energy demand to power a potential control system, 20 pumps, maximum power point trackers, data loggers and data transmitters could be sustainably supplied by renewable sources, such as other MFCs, 82,83 solar panels 64 or wind turbines. 76 Stacking together multiple MFC units is an effective strategy to boost the power output. 84 …”

Alfred

“…Applications deployed onto battery-less devices typically consist in a sense-process-transmit loop [1,13,27]. Checkpoint techniques…”