Design and Development of Microbial Fuel Cells Based Low Power Energy Harvesting Mechanism for Ecological Monitoring and Farming of Agricultural Applications

Abstract

Energy harvesting from the microbial fuel cells have a significant attention in the recent days, due to their cost efficiency, simple designing structure and self-powered system. Also, the emergence of internet of things plays a vital role in many real time application scenarios like agricultural purposes and activities. But, the incorporation of these techniques is one of challenging and interesting tasks in the research field. In the conventional works, the internet of things has been utilized as a cloud storage domain for activating the sensors used for environmental monitoring and controlling purposes. The main intention of this paper is to design a robust and cost-effective sludge water based microbial fuel cells, and utilize it for an internet of things incorporated ecological monitoring and farming applications by activating the smart sensors. It discusses about the various electrode combination with several mixture of substrate to study about the optimum performance of microbial fuel cells. To ease the comparative study, Thing Speak platform is used along with the necessary sensors for continuous monitoring. In addition to that, the efficiency of single and dual chamber microbial fuel cell is analyzed based on the set of parameters such as cost, size, and construction. In this work, the microbial fuel cell-based energy harvesting scheme is also developed with switched capacitance-based metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor and relay-based charge pump circuit which can be incorporated to the internet of things based agriculture applications. Here, the cost analysis of microbial fuel cell with and without DC–DC converter have been compared for selecting the most suitable one for the application system. Moreover, the digital temperature and humidity sensor can be utilized with the proposed microbial fuel cell system for gathering the inputs of the ecological system, which acts as an interface of the microbial fuel cell and cloud systems. During experimentation, the results of both the energy harvesting schemes are evaluated and compared by using various performance indicators.