Plant-based batteries. Aloe Vera circuit

[Jonathan Cline]

move over, potato.

Potential application of Aloe Vera-derived plant-based cell in powering wireless device for remote sensor activation

Peng Lean Chong , Ajay Kumar Singh, Swee Leong Kok

Published: December 27, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227153

 

Abstract

It is well proven that electrical energy can be harvested from the living plants which can be used as a potential renewable energy source for powering wireless devices in remote areas where replacing or recharging the battery is a difficult task. Therefore, harvesting electrical energy from living plants in remote areas such as in farms or forest areas can be an ideal source of energy as these areas are rich with living plants. The present paper proposes a design of a power management circuit that can harness, store and manage the electrical energy which is harvested from the leaves of Aloe Barbadensis Miller (Aloe Vera) plants to trigger a transmitter load to power a remote sensor. The power management circuit consists of two sections namely; an energy storage system that acts as an energy storage reservoir to store the energy harvested from the plants as well as a voltage regulation system which is used to boost and manage the energy in accordance to a load operation. The experimental results show that the electrical energy harvested from the Aloe Vera under a specific setup condition can produce an output of 3.49 V and 1.1 mA. The harvested energy is being channeled to the power management circuit which can boost the voltage to 10.9 V under no load condition. The harvested energy from the plants boosted by the power management circuit can turn ON the transmitter automatically to activate a temperature and humidity sensor to measure the environmental stimuli periodically with a ton of 1.22 seconds and toff of 0.46 seconds. This proves that this new source of energy combined with a power management circuit can be employed for powering the wireless sensor network for application in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Conclusion

In this paper, a plant base cell (PBC) has been proposed as a new electrical energy source to power low power consumption devices such as a transmitter. The PBC constitutes of a power management system that is connected to Cu-Zn electrode pairs which are embedded into the leaves of the Aloe Vera plants. The proposed power management system can perform a fully autonomous operation to harvest the electrical energy from the Aloe Vera plants to trigger a transmitter load to send signal periodically to the temperature and humidity sensor. This has been confirmed by performing the experiment under a real-life condition. The designed power management circuit, which consists of an energy storage system and a voltage regulation system, can store the minute energy harvested from the Aloe Vera plants and boost them into sufficient energy to power a transmitter load. The transmitter load is proven to be in operation as it sends an intermittent signal to the receiver circuit to activate a remote sensor to measure the surrounding temperature and humidity. Thus, it is experimentally proven in this paper that Aloe Vera plants can be used as an energy source to provide electrical energy and its combination with the proposed power management circuit can act as a plant base cell. The idea of the proposed plant as a battery source can provide significant benefits in IoT application especially in remote areas or dense forest where replacing battery or recharging battery is impossible. The proposed cell can also be employed for precision farming and environmental monitoring where plants are available in abundant.

[Bryan Jones]

Unless I'm missing something, there is no "electrical energy" being "harvested from plants" here. Isn't this just like the potato battery where the energy is coming from the redox reaction between the copper and zinc electrodes? The potato or aloe is just providing the electrolyte to facilitate that reaction. You can only get as much energy as your electrodes can provide before they break down, it doesn't matter how much plant there is since the energy isn't coming from the plant. For convenience, you may as well just add a bit of electrolyte to your electrodes and package them in a convenient container that doesn't need to be planted in the ground.

--Bryan Jones

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[Cathal Garvey]

I haven't read the paper, but there is a well established potential difference between a plant's stem tissues and the root soil. It's just in the millivolts with negligible energy, so cable losses alone are probably enough to prevent putting trees in series to get useful energy.

What this paper is achieving is storing and voltage-multiplying the energy from single plants into useful transmission power, which is pretty cool. Still highly unlikely to be useful for anything aggregate, but cool for the stated purpose alone: IOT atmospheric monitoring.

You are right to be skeptical though, I'm truly sick of seeing those "science" kits pandered to kids that advertise "free energy from lemons and potatoes" and are clearly just a copper/zinc cell with more pageantry.

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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Bryan Jones]

I haven't looked really closely at the paper, but I don't doubt that they achieved something interesting and potentially useful in energy storage and voltage-multiplication. But my point was they aren't getting the energy from the plant, that's just a misunderstanding of the science. They are bringing all the energy in the metals. The plant is just a distraction.

--Bryan Jones

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[Cathal Garvey]

Just to be clear about my prior message: even if you use the same metal for both electrodes (excluding a simple galvanic cell), you will still get a PD between stem and root soil. Plant roots move ions, this creates a PD that can be measured, probably using a hobby grade multimeter.

It is likely that, in similar fashion, you could get a PD between blood and urine or stomach contents, in a human.

[John Griessen]

On 12/27/19 4:44 PM, Bryan Jones wrote:
> t I don't doubt that they achieved something interesting and potentially useful in energy storage and voltage-multiplication. But
> my point was they aren't getting the energy from the plant,

Oh, I wonder that PhDs would err that way. There is not much need to multiply 1 volt from wet chemistry cells, just put a few in
series and use ordinary switching supplies.

I bet they have some careful low loss stepping up of voltages to advantage
the mV levels of plants, not corroding wires.

I'm in the middle of a move to NM, so I have not looked t up myself.

Someone needs to actually read the journal article.

:-)

[Dina Amiri]

Couldn't be it something much more sophisticated like producing electricity from/with Algae? Who would have believed!

[Henri Lentonen]

Harvesting electrons from algae would minimize the growth as the algae normal metabolia operations would be less then. Removing electrons inside algal photosystem would also Most likely destroy the cell itself. 

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[Cathal Garvey]

If you want energy from single celled organisms, the potential difference will be across a cell membrane. Accessing this in practice implies a conductive pilus, a related but distinct area of research mostly focused around geobacter IIRC.

Possibly a well-structured biofilm could be harvested from the surrounding matrix, but I think that's poorly studied.

[cathal...@cathalgarvey.me]

Not to mention that.. I'm pretty sure that good solar panels have a better conversion efficiency than the algae that we're good at growing. And if you're either manufacturing a bioreactor full of moving parts, or a solid-state panel, probably you're better off with the latter. So for bulk 'efficient' energy production I don't think directly plant-derived energy is going to be a winner.

But, for on-site trickle-charging, it's ideal: especially in a forested area where ground-level light for a solar panel is terrible, or falling detritus or growing matter will quickly smother a solar charger. If it's a circuit on a spike that you can just drive into a tree and connect to ground, that's pretty robust.

As for trees-in-series.. I would love to see this idea happen if it were practical, but I have a feeling that the voltages needed to preserve the current over cables would be high enough to arc in outdoor conditions. :)

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[Nathan McCorkle]

On Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 9:18 AM <cathal...@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:

As for trees-in-series.. I would love to see this idea happen if it were practical, but I have a feeling that the voltages needed to preserve the current over cables would be high enough to arc in outdoor conditions. :)

Just need some plant-based super-conducting wires, then!