Increasing the Energy Output from Living-plants Fuel Cells with Natural Photosynthesis.

From thINTRODUCTION

Plant-based energy generation is emerging as a new method that harvesting electrical energy from living plants. A team of electrical engineers from the University of Washington had devised a voltage boost converter for energy harvesting from trees [1]. This development has the potential to provide an unlimited supply of clean energy [2]. These have been extensively investigated to generate cleaner, inexhaustible, abundant and environmentally friendly power. The environmental concern has greatly increased the interests of switching to renewable energy sources [3-6]. The safety concerns of fossil fuels not existing in the plant-based energy source. There is always a need to find out alternatives in a more environmentally friendly way.

Following to this, researchers taking photosynthetic processes into consideration as the abundance of solar energy. Researchers have developed a way to manipulate the proteins contained in the thylakoids and interrupt the pathway along which electrons flow before they are used to make sugars [7-8]. Ryu et.al inserted a nanoscale and attempted to probe photosynthesis with their main focus on energy extraction [8]. Sunlight transformation into bioelectricity based on photosynthesis process in a living plant for observing and understanding photosynthesis kinetics also discussed by Flexer and Mano [9]. Even though the electrical output directly from plants is still unpretentious, it is a promising and certainly worth exploring further [10].

In the previous work, some fundamental procedures to harvest the weak electricity from living plants which consist detail of harvester selection, type of plants and with potential application was presented [11]. The electrochemistry process is beli...

... middle of paper ...

...n flow to the LFC anode and converted into electricity. The electrons that used for the extracellular photosynthetic electrons in the LFC are termed as the photosynthetic current (Figure 5).

CONCLUSION

This paper established a significant increment energy output of LFC in both harvested current (43%) and harvested power (111%) with the natural photosynthesis. It is believed that the energy origin of LFC with illumination is taking into account for both electrochemistry and photosynthesis process. The solar energy captured by living plant converted into chemical energy can be transferred as an electron flow (photosynthetic current) to the LFC anode (zinc) and as an addition electrons flow through the external load as electricity. The mechanism of energy production of LFC is modelled based on the principles of both electrochemistry and photosynthesis process.