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Scientists Develop New Dirt-Powered Fuel Cell That Runs Forever (scitechdaily.com)

submitted 7 months ago by machinin@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 54 points 7 months ago (4 children)

How much power does it produce? It must be pretty bad since they don't mention it anywhere in the article.

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 37 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 7 months ago

Probably generates nanowatts

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm thinking around 6

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

Damn I hoped it would go to eleven, I need that little bit extra.

[–] vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

For low power applications. You won't be charging your phone off this.

[–] RealFknNito@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

Depends on how many fuel cells you get and are able to shovel dirt into

[–] Hobbes@startrek.website -2 points 7 months ago

1.21 gigawatts