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.
How much power does it produce? It must be pretty bad since they don’t mention it anywhere in the article.
For low power applications. You won’t be charging your phone off this.
Depends on how many fuel cells you get and are able to shovel dirt into
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.
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.
Love these pie in the sky articles that get debunked immediately in the comments
Who debunked this? I don’t any comments debunking it.
Also if you read the article it has limited applications so it’s not some pie in the sky you think it.
" As long as there is organic carbon in the soil for the microbes to break down, the fuel cell can potentially last forever.”
It’s also a stationary battery
“Although the entire device is buried, the vertical design ensures that the top end is flush with the ground’s surface.”
