Natural outlet

 

Trees are becoming an unlikely power source as engineers have found that they can generate a voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts. A millivolt is one-thousandth of a volt.

In a study last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers placed an electrode in a plant and another in the surrounding soil to power sensors.

Now a team from the University of Washington (UW) seek to further that research by building circuits to run off the energy in trees. The results of this study are published in an upcoming issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Transactions on Nanotechnology.

The UW team have successfully run a circuit (measuring 130 nanometers and consuming on average just 10 nanowatts of power during operation) solely off tree power. Furthermore, they found that a popular tree on the UW campus, bigleaf maples, can generate a steady voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts.

To use the available power, the UW team built a device that could take a low incoming voltage and store it to produce a greater output – a boost converter. The boost converter can work with voltages of as little as 20 millivolts but can produce enough output voltage (1.1 volts) to run low-power sensors.

"Normal electronics are not going to run on the types of voltages and currents that we get out of a tree. But the nanoscale is not just in size, but also in the energy and power consumption," said co-author Babak Parviz, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering.

"As new generations of technology come online…I think it's warranted to look back at what's doable or what's not doable in terms of a power source" he concluded.

Plugged in

Meet Role Models working in electronic engineering.

You’ve read it. Now review it.

Back to top

Back to top