Plantara

Inspiration

I was inspired as I love animals and spending time in nature and this idea made me realize and research the different problems ongoing in the world that are hurting these animals and life on Earth. So, I wanted to contribute something on my behalf to help a cause that is directly connected with what's affecting them as I saw many people hurting the environment, but also countless saving it and I wanted to be a part of them.

What it does

Plantara is a way to derive clean and green energy for the world's use as it could help the many environmental concerns that exist today especially the carbon emission and pollution causes. It uses the microbial fuel cell technology to gain energy from a plant or tree and convert it into electricity without affecting the plant's growth in any way.

How we built it

Plantara is a solution that can surely encourage change. This is how it works. This innovation is heavily dependent on the concept of organic matter. Organic matter refers to the large source of carbon-based compounds that come from the remains of plants, animals, and their waste products in the environment. Plants excrete organic matter into the soil, which is then broken down by bacteria. During this breakdown process, electrons are being released as a waste product of the bacteria living around plant roots. It is possible to harvest those electrons using inert electrodes to turn them into electricity, without affecting the plant’s growth. Precious metals, mercury, and carbon are typically used as inert electrodes. For example, zinc could be the anode and copper could be the cathode. These two materials would be connected with wires to run the current of electricity, and that would make up the microbial fuel cell part within Plantara. Next, the energy harvester would take that energy and convert it into electricity suitable for use. An example of an energy harvester that could be used as a part for Plantara would be the Microgen energy harvesting converter. The boost converter connected underneath the energy harvester would be used to “step up” the voltage of the input current to its output current. A boost converter is a DC to DC (which is a voltage source) converter with an output voltage greater than the source voltage. This is a very important part of the design as the increase in voltage can allow an object that requires more power to be used. For the boost converter to work, though, an energy storage element needs to be directly connected. In this case, that is the supercapacitor. A supercapacitor is similar to a battery except it is faster when transferring the current to an external source like a low-power sensor. Not only that, but they charge and store energy at a faster rate than batteries and have a longer lifespan. This means that if Plantara were to be used throughout the world, then around 3 trillion trees could produce approximately 75 billion kWh of electricity per day, which could cover the energy consumption of about 1.2 billion people. This would be a major step toward the era of cleaner energy and advanced technologies. To make this more scalable, if a country like Russia, which contains about 21% of the world’s trees with about 642 billion trees, were to use this technology on as many trees as possible it could cover about 5% of the entire world’s energy needs.

Challenges we ran into

I ran into challenges finding the right metal for the electrodes and doubting whether this method would provide enough electricity to actually run something or it would be too light.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that we tried to contribute to the environment in some way and achieve a method that could be the part of the future of clean and green energy.

What we learned

I learned a lot about the renewable energy industry and how necessary it is for us to make a transition because the Earth is suffering in so many ways and it is our job to protect our and many other living things' home.

What's next for Plantara

I would love to take this idea further to build a prototype and research further on how to implement this idea, so it could, as soon as possible, start encouraging change.

Built With

• databases
• research