Modern agriculture models tend towards promoting using resources efficiently, the sustainability of the sector, the preservation of the environment, and the safety and quality of products. Thus, water and energy access play a major role in agriculture development, being affected by their availability, as these are important determinants of land productivity. In that sense, innovative approaches towards solving these issues rely on high-precision sustainable agricultural technologies, developed to foster the demand for water and energy. Nonetheless, these are often limited by the characteristics of conventional power sources composed of heavy metals with a short lifetime that requiring manual replacement. On the other hand, greener alternatives such as solar panels, vibration energy or wind power, have proven to provide discontinuous energy supplies, while being expensive to produce, implement and maintain.
SOIL2POWERr project aims at solving this energy crisis using a new and innovative soil-microbial fuel cell (SMFC). SMFCs are power sources that take advantage of microorganisms’ metabolism, using organic matter present in the soil as fuel to generate electrical energy. The product developed, the BIOOCELL, will be a biological battery of rapid start-up, with stable high-power supply capacity, that can control irrigation valves during years without maintenance or replacement, being integrated into currently used precise water irrigation technologies producing high-impact in different areas (Figure 1).
To achieve this goal, the development of three different technology pillars are proposed: i) bioanodes containing electrogenic bacteria and redox mediators immobilized using a silk matrix for efficient electron transfer and energy production, (ii) biobattery architecture & materials optimization focusing attention on the standardization and maximum knowledge of the matrix, the soil, and (iii) low-energy consumption electronics able to control the biobattery operation at the same time that it stores the energy produced and controls the opening and closing of the irrigation valves.
