Voltree Power’s patented bioenergy harvester converts living plant metabolic energy to useable electricity, providing a unique battery replacement alternative for ultra-low power sensors and eventually a power source in nanotechnology. Voltree believes that integrated circuit advances will eventually lead to the development of electronics which will require diminishing amounts for power for operation. These naturally-occuring phenomena can serve as a power source in environmental sensing networks for climatic and wildlife monitoring in areas with limited accessibility and where battery replacement is not an option. Self sustaining power sources such as tree power will play a crictical role in these future applications.
Benefits of this technology include:
- Enables the use of mesh sensor technology where it would otherwise be difficult to install power devices or hard-to-reach sensor devices for maintenance.
- Eliminates the cost of (hundreds) of thousands of batteries, labor costs associated with battery replacement/maintenance, along with environmental and labor costs of responsible battery disposition/recycling.
- Does not depend on wind, light, heat gradients, or mechanical movement.
- Weather-resistant and completely quiet.
- Absence of any heat or noise signatures, making it ideal for various covert, security-sensitive sensing applications.
- Environmentally benign to produce and operate.
- Parasitically harvests metabolic energy from any large plant without harming it.
- Useful lifetime of the device is only limited by the lifetime of the host.
Voltree Power’s Javelin node that can be used with Voltree Power’s bioenergy harvester or with other renewable power sources to allow for the collection and transmission of sensor data from remote or hard-to-reach areas.
Read the story of our first successful field test.
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