Food safety and supply chain efficiency can benefit from using smart technology to track the health, reproductivity, location, and environmental conditions of cattle, but this monitoring adds energy costs to an already highly emissive business.
To tackle this, researchers have invented a wearable smart gadget for cows that harnesses the kinetic energy generated by even their slightest movements and utilizes it to power smart ranch technology. The device will be published in the journal iScience on December 1, 2022.
“On a ranch, monitoring environmental and health information of cattle can help prevent diseases and improve the efficiency of pasture breeding and management,” says co-author Zutao Zhang, an energy researcher at Southwest Jiaotong University in China. “This information can include oxygen concentration, air temperature and humidity, amount of exercise, reproductive cycles, disease, and milk production.”
In the team’s concept for a “smart ranch,” cows are outfitted with tiny sensory devices around their necks and ankles that are driven by their movements as they go about their daily ranch chores.
“There is a tremendous amount of kinetic energy that can be harvested in cattle’s daily movements, such as walking, running, and even neck movement,” says co-author Yajia Pan, also an energy researcher at Southwest Jiaotong University.Once captured, the energy is stored in a lithium battery and used to power the device.
Kinetic energy is everywhere in the environment leaves swaying in the wind, the movement of people and animals, the undulation of waves, the rotation of the earth these phenomena all contain a lot of kinetic energy, We shouldn’t let this energy go to waste.
Zutao Zhang
“Our kinetic energy harvester specially harvests the kinetic energy of weak motion,” says Zhang. The team’s design is unique because it contains a motion enhancement mechanism that uses magnets and a pendulum to amplify small movements the cows make.
Zhang aspires for the adoption of smart technology in ranches to be a component of a bigger initiative to enhance global food systems.
“With the development of 5G technology and the Internet of Things, the operation of the entire industrial chain of the food system is more intelligent and transparent,” he says.
A brief jog was all that was required for the device to gauge temperature, according to Zhang and his colleagues who also tested the gadgets on humans. Future applications, according to the researchers, include smart homes, healthcare, sports tracking, and the development of human wireless sensor networks.
“Kinetic energy is everywhere in the environment leaves swaying in the wind, the movement of people and animals, the undulation of waves, the rotation of the earth these phenomena all contain a lot of kinetic energy,” says Zhang, “We shouldn’t let this energy go to waste.”
The National Natural Foundation of China, Science, and Technology Projects of Sichuan, and Science and Technology Projects of Chengdu supported this work.
