Towards renewable green energy produced by prickly pear living plant

Abstract

In recent years, low power consumption and portable devices have been developed that will be connected and used everywhere. However, this explosion will bring critical challenges to electricity consumption. In this work, copper and zinc electrodes are embedded in prickly pear plant as an electricity generation has been analysed and evaluated. Many experimental setups have been performed to determine the optimum method to collect the maximum amount of energy from the living plant. They study the influence of distance between electrodes, influence of the electrode’s size, influence of the electrode’s depth, effect of the couple electrodes number, and effect of series and parallel connection to harvested energy. Therefore, a combination of series and parallel connection among the leaves can be installed to harvest higher voltage and current. The experimental results show that 58,8 mW electrical power can be harvested using 18 pairs of electrodes embedded in 6 leaves. The produced energy is used to power up low-power devices such as a calculator or a light emitting diode (LED) and can be stored in a capacitor or a battery.

Keywords

• green energy
• living plant energy
• renewable energy
• electrochemical energy
• bioenergy