Abstract
The emergence of modern technologies, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, involves the use of batteries, which pose a serious environmental risk, with billions of batteries disposed of every year. However, the combination of sensors and wireless communication devices is extremely power-hungry. Energy Harvesting (EH) is fundamental in enabling the use of low-power electronic devices that derive their energy from external sources, such as Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC), solar power, thermal and kinetic energy, among others. Plant Microbial Fuel Cell (PMFC) is a prominent clean energy source and a step towards the development of self-powered systems in indoor and outdoor environments. One of the main challenges with PMFCs is the dynamic power supply, dynamic charging rates and low-energy supply. In this paper, a PMFC-based energy harvester system is proposed for the implementation of autonomous self-powered sensor nodes with IoT and cloud-based service communication protocols. The PMFC design is specifically adapted with the proposed EH circuit for the implementation of IoT-WSN based applications. The PMFC-EH system has a maximum power point at 0.71 V, a current density of 5 mA cm, and a power density of 3.5 mW cm with a single plant. Considering a sensor node with a current consumption of 0.35 mA, the PMFC-EH green energy system allows a power autonomy for real-time data processing of IoT-based low-power WSN systems.
Highlights
Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based wireless sensor networks (WSN) are composed of miniaturized sensor nodes distributed in an area to collect real-time data such as temperature, salinity, water stress, and humidity
In order to guarantee the correct use of the Plant Microbial Fuel Cell (PMFC) in low power IoT applications, several PMFC
In our conducted experiments was observed that PMFCs with
Summary
Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based wireless sensor networks (WSN) are composed of miniaturized sensor nodes distributed in an area to collect real-time data such as temperature, salinity, water stress, and humidity. PMFC harnesses the metabolism of micro-organisms as catalysts and uses organic matter to generate electrical energy, reaching power densities of several hundreds of μW cm−2 ; their main advantage is that they can generate energy from organic matter in the soil as fuel [12,13,14,15,16] This technology maintains the natural landscape of the place where it is wanted to be implemented; e.g., it can be used as green wall for improving the city environment. A dynamic power management strategy is adopted to harvest the maximum energy from a PMFC to provide a self-autonomous operation of the wireless sensor node.
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