Three university students in Santiago, Chile have developed a plant---powered device to charge their mobile phones.
The three engineering students got the idea for the device while sitting in their school’s courtyard. Their invention is a small biological circuit they call E-kaia. It captures the energy plants produce during photosynthesis.
A plant uses only a small part of the energy produced by that process.The rest goes into the soil.E-kaia collects that energy.The device plugs into the ground and then into a mobile phone.
One of the student inventors, Camila Rupcich, says the device changes the energy released from the plant into low-level power to charge phones.
The E-kaia is able to fully recharge a mobile phone in less than two hours.