A Self-Sustainable Power Management System for Reliable Power Scaling Up of Sediment Microbial Fuel Cells

Sediment microbial fuel cells (SMFCs) are considered a promising renewable power source for remote monitoring applications. However, existing SMFCs can only produce several milliwatts of power, and the output power is not scaled linearly with the size of SMFCs. An effective alternative method to increase the output power is to independently operate multiple SMFCs, each of which has an optimal size for maximum power density. Independently operated SMFCs have electrically isolated electrodes (anodes/cathodes), which complicates the design of a suitable power management system (PMS). This paper describes the challenges in designing a PMS that can harvest energy from multiple independently operated (mio) SMFCs and accordingly proposes a design solution. From experimental results, the proposed PMS demonstrates reliable output power scaling up of mio-SMFC. The proposed PMS is self-sustainable because it is powered entirely from harvested energy without requiring additional external power sources.