Technology


Green electronics project to create compostable crop sensors


An international research collaboration works to fi nd new ways of monitoring crop growth with biodegradable sensors that can be composted at end of life. T e £1.8m project, called “Transient


Electronics for Sustainable ICT in Digital Agriculture”, is led by researchers from the University of Glasgow and supported by scientist teams in Canada, Finland, Poland and Switzerland. Over the next three years, the partners will work together to develop a new type of environmentally-friendly modular sensor system and create devices built from sustainable and degradable materials in response to the growing problem of electronic waste. “T e proliferation of digital devices that


underpin the Internet of T ings will lead to a massive expansion in digital waste – as much as 80% of our electronic devices currently end up as waste. As potentially dangerous materials in components like batteries and printed circuit boards degrade, they create hazards to the environment and human and animal health, which can last for decades,” said Professor Ravinder Dahiya of the University of


Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering, the project’s coordinator. T e new devices will have two parts: a


solar-powered patch that can be applied to the surface of the leaves of crops to measure key indicators of their growth, and an electronic module that will wirelessly transmit that information to a central computer. T e patch will be completely biodegradable and capable of nourishing the soil once it reaches the end of its useful life. To make this happen, the scientists will investigate how compostable electronic components might be made from everyday materials like rice husks and wool, or from biodegradable polymers like starch or cellulose, combined with conductive metal nanoparticles made from materials like copper and zinc. T ey will also explore how the compostable components can be powered by similarly biodegradable organic photovoltaic materials, to support the patch’s tasks of monitoring pH, temperature and bioimpedance, with energy stored in a biodegradable supercapacitor. Supercapacitors provide a sustainable, non-toxic alternative for conventional batteries.


T e electronic module will be equipped with


wireless communication technology, but it will be reusable and repairable to further minimise waste. “Our undertaking to build disposable


hardware without creating waste is an ambitious one, but it brings together some of the leading experts in the fi eld of sensor and material development from across Europe and North America. I’m confi dent that we can create prototypes with the potential to make real change and take us closer to achieving a zero-waste world,” added Dahiya. T e research is funded by URKI in the UK,


FRQNT in Canada, the Academy of Finland, NCN in Poland and SNSF in Switzerland.


Fotech increases accuracy of fi bre-based sensors with Nvidia solutions


Technology company Fotech uses Nvidia’s GPU-accelerated computing and soſt ware solutions to process high volumes of data needed for its distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technology. Fotech’s DAS technology turns a fi bre


optic cable into thousands of sensors that detect disturbances along its length. Light pulses are sent each second, and the refl ected signals monitored for patterns. When acoustic or vibrational energy – such as that created by digging, walking or driving, for example – creates a strain on the optical fi bre, this changes the refl ected light pattern. T ese changes are then subjected to analysis algorithms and processing techniques to identify and categorise the disturbances. Each type of disturbance has its own signature, so the technology can determine in real time what happened, where and when. Such information is very valuable in sectors such


as telecommunications, power infrastructure and security. However, one of the challenges Fotech


needed to solve is ensure the high accuracy of its technology. “We need to process up to 600MB of data


per second – an exceptionally large volume that would take too long to transfer to the cloud,” said Steve Cammish, Fotech’s Chief Technology Offi cer. “In order to detect with the sensitivity required and cover the distance of fi bre being monitored, we require intense edge computing.”


Fotech uses Nvidia’s Jetson edge AI


platform. “T e Nvidia Jetson platform and CUDA libraries are very important for us, since they allow us to process the data in parallel and help us detect the diff erent types of events, such as spade strikes or footfall. Once we know these events, we can use much lower data rates, and then either process them on the device or in the cloud, to create alarms,” said Cammish. In addition, the accuracy of the events


is further improved by implementing new data fl ows for machine learning. “T e current approach requires


signifi cant manual tuning of thresholds and frequency bands to classify disruptions like walking, digging and vehicle movements, all of which takes time,” said Cammish. Here, Fotech used Nvidia’s TensorRT, a soſt ware development kit for high- performance deep-learning inference.


www.electronicsworld.co.uk September 2022 05


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