A team of Chilean scientists has created a rather strange technical solution that will soon charge your smartphone by using real plants. The invention, called E-Kaia, has been in the works for six years and has even won several prestigious awards around the world so everything presented here is real and more than serious.
It turns out that every living plant produces more energy than it actually needs to survive and produce seeds. The principle behind E-Kaia is simple – the technology traps all this excess energy and then turns it into electrical energy than can be used for various purposes. In addition, in order to work properly E-Kaia needs a single healthy plant, unlike other similar projects that require more than 100 square meters of plants to achieve the same effect.
E-Kaia generates 5V and 600 mAh of energy and by doing this does not cause any harm to the plant used. The team behind this invention claims that E-Kaia can fully recharge a smartphone in one hour and thirty minutes but the battery capacity was not disclosed. The invention is still in development with the main goal now being to make it even more efficient so that it can be used with devices that need more power. Unfortunately technical details are not available as of now.
In the future the technology can be used to get totally clean energy from plants as well as serve areas where it is difficult to have constant access to the electrical grid.
Source: Ibtimes.co.uk