Comment on Scientists Develop New Dirt-Powered Fuel Cell That Runs Forever

cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  They claim “68 times more than required to operate the sensors”, then mention a sensor to measure soil moisture.

  A basic soil moisture sensor, like say, the ones I have stacked on a shelf here, will work on 2 AA batteries. It runs on 2V at 10mA. So that’s 20 milliWatts, and in willing to be a fair bit of that goes into the electronics that make a red, green or orange led light up at certain moisture levels.

  Still, this sets something of an upper limit at 1.3W, or maybe 680 mA? Those seem rather high, so I’m betting their moisture sensor is a bit more delicate than my model. It depends on the size and number of cells though.

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  • muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Im pretty sure most soil moisture measurment devices just measure the capacitance to measure dielectric permittivity. U can design such a setup to use any arbitrary amount of power depending how close the electrodes are rogether etc etc.

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  • Willie@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, I am imagining the soil moisture things from the garden store, with the little needle gauge thing, that take so little power that there's no battery slot. I feel like the amount of power this thing makes if extremely low.

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  • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Probably generates nanowatts

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• WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The linked article has a table that gives 1.74 uW/cm^2. However glancing over the rest of the paper there's a ton of variability of output.

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• thefartographer@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m thinking around 6

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  • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Damn I hoped it would go to eleven, I need that little bit extra.

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• vext01@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  For low power applications. You won’t be charging your phone off this.

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  • RealFknNito@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Depends on how many fuel cells you get and are able to shovel dirt into

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• Hobbes@startrek.website ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  1.21 gigawatts

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