Energy Harvesting from Ammonia Gas Treatment Tank in Organic Fertilizer Powder Plant

This paper proposes an ammonia monitoring system that harvests energy to operate in a chicken manure fertilizer plant. The harvesting is done via thermoelectric generators (TEGs) and photovoltaic (PV) cells. The TEGs convert heat energy on the surface of an air treatment tank into electrical energy by using the Seebeck effect. Since the temperature on the surface of the tank is not high, the TEGs can supply low-power loads. The other loads in the proposed system are powered by the PV cells. Energies obtained from TEGs and PV cells are stored in a supercapacitor (SC) and two lithium batteries, respectively. According to our experiment, the maximum power consumption used by the system was 644mW, while the maximum harvested energy was 4.4W on a sunny day. Together with our developed power management mechanism, our experiment showed that the harvested energies could supply enough energy for a device to run continuously while being able to detect abnormal level of ammonia correctly.