SOIL microbial fuel cells TO (2) POWER precise irrigation systems.

ongoing

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.