Project description
Microbial fuel cell-based technology for clean power
The agricultural industry, particularly smart agriculture, is already a vital player in the global economy and logistics, and its importance is expected to grow. Additionally, agriculture represents a significant domain for introducing and adopting clean solutions. The EU-funded SOIL2POWER project acknowledges the important role of the agricultural sector and aims to develop a novel power-sourcing technology capable of generating clean and stable energy using microbial fuel cells. This technology will leverage controlled electrogenic biofilms, ensuring high-efficiency biobatteries that produce safe, clean, durable and maintenance-free energy. The application of this technology to irrigation systems is anticipated to reduce the need for maintenance or replacement.
Objective
Smart agriculture is determined to play a major role to foster water and energy conservation solutions, and innovation technologies
should be aimed at overcoming current technical, economic, and sustainable barriers. The SOIL2POWER project focuses on
developing a breakthrough power sourcing technology based in Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs), that leverage the natural microbial
metabolism processes using organic matter present at the soil to generate electrical energy. The consortium will build a controlled
electrogenic biofilm formation by immobilization techniques to increase overall biobattery performance, creating a continuous,
clean, safe, and maintenance-free energy supply solution. By facing relevant challenges throughout the project, such as bacterial
behavior, startup time conditions or electrode architecture an innovative biological battery of rapid start-up and stable high-power
supply will be conducted to control irrigation valves without maintenance and replacement.
Feasibility and validation of separate components have been already conducted through lab studies and will be the starting point to
perform a continuous improvement development during the first stages of the project. Afterwards, a prototype will be tested in
simulated environment by the end of year 2. If solution is validated with the whole functions up and running, during year 3
(2024-2025) a complete deployment of marketing and investment strategies will be performed, alongside operational environment
validation to rate real performance based on real feedback from end-users.
SOIL2POWER will contribute and ease the transition to develop novel technological solutions by boosting the innovation in clean
energy solutions industry, strengthening human capital, biotechnological research innovatinos and eventually enabling the adoption
of sustainable energy solutions in agricultural industry, paving the way to a sustainable precise irrigation systems for smart
agriculture.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
08840 Barcelona
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.