In our fight against climate change, we need detailed environmental data, especially in critical ecosystems like rainforests. But, deploying remote sensing systems is complicated, especially powering them. Under the foliage of trees, solar panels aren't very effective. Large batteries are expensive and replacing them is a hazardous nightmare. What if we could skip batteries and solar panels altogether? What if we could harness energy from abundant air moisture in rainforests?
Introducing Navitas: the world’s first remote sensing platform powered exclusively by air.
You’ve seen software projects at hackathons. You’ve seen hardware projects. You’ve also seen projects that combine both. But what I guarantee you haven’t seen before is a full chemistry lab set up at a hackathon.
In just 35 hours, we’ve synthesized a carbon-nanoparticle doped ionic hydrogel, based on Polyvinyl alcohol and MgCl2, which creates a voltage potential difference when exposed to the moisture in the air. Each cell comprises multiple paper-thin layers, and when connected in series, creates energy that can be harnessed for many low-power, long term tasks.
The gel complex is connected to an Arduino circuit with a wireless transceiver and two sensors: temperature and humidity. We’ve built a simulated rainforest environment to achieve relative humidity levels of over 80%, where our gels thrive best. The data gathered by the Arduino is then sent wirelessly to a receiver. After it’s deserialized, the beautiful data visualization web app that we’ve built makes it easy for users to monitor data from sensors hundreds of kilometres away.
The biggest challenge was getting the stupid PVA to dissolve in water. Some of the greatest young chemists of our time have told stories of setting stir rods for days on end, with no success. The problem is, PVA instantly becomes gooey when it touches any kind of moisture, which makes it almost impossible to dissolve with water at room temperature. We overcame this challenge by 1. Using a hot plate at almost boiling temperatures 2. Stirring it with our hands for hours.
Synthesizing ionic hydrogels to produce electricity from literal thin air has never been done before at a hackathon: this was the biggest challenge for us. The few papers published on this topic have all used day-long procedures, involving drying periods of 12 hours or more. We only have 35 hours at uOttaHack, so we can’t waste ⅓ of it just waiting for the gel to dry! In general, there were a lot of factors that we had to adjust and improvise to fit the nature of uOttaHack.
This was a learning experience for all of us. We specialize in different fields (Hooman electrochem, Jeffrey software, Victor hardware) so collaborating on a cohesive project together meant that a lot of learning happened in a short period of time. What’s next. Just during this weekend, we’ve already set up a US Provisional Patent for Navitas. Next steps include finalizing the patent, showing people our cool project, and raising a preseed for Solcoa Technologies (solcoa.tech).