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According to a new study, there are such a large number of trees, which are enough for providing power to an electronic circuit.
The study, which was conducted in 2008 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has come up with an astonishing fact that plants have the potential to produce about 200 millivolts, if just a single electrode is kept on a plant, with the other being kept in the surrounding area.
"As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree," University of Washington (UW) associate professor of electrical engineering and study co-author Babak Parviz said.
A company which is into the development of forest sensors have been set up by the research team so that this new source of power can be utilized. They will be exploring the power source by building circuits to run off that energy.
Co-author Carlton Himes, UW undergraduate student, spent last summer exploring likely sites. Hooking nails to trees and connecting a voltmeter, he found that big leaf maples, common on the UW campus, generate a steady voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts.
The UW team developed a device which has the potential to run on available power. Co-author Brian Otis, UW assistant professor of electrical engineering, led the development of a boost converter, a device which has the potential to intake lower voltage power and store it to be converted into high voltage output.
This booster functions for input voltages of as little as 20 millivolts, an input voltage which is the lowest of all the convertors. Lower. It produces an output voltage of 1.1 volts, enough to run low-power sensors.
The UW circuit is built from parts measuring 130 nanometres and it consumes on average just 10 nanowatts of power during operation.
"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," Parviz said, according to an UW release.
Even though the power generated from trees cannot replace solar power, it can offer a low-cost option for powering tree sensors, which can be used for finding out forest fires. The electronic output could also be used to gauge a tree's health.
These results are slated for publication in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Transactions on Nanotechnology.
