Arduino Based Green Veggie Chamber: Harnessing Kinetic Energy from Water Flow in Kitchen

Abstract: Electrical energy has its applications in each and every domain of our life. It is directly or indirectly involved in every aspect of human life. Its usage has increased to a large scale nowadays. As of now the major portion of electric energy generated is by hydro and thermal energy. There is a danger of its depletion soon. Technical community is consistently searching for renewable, sustainable, and feasible energy source. Generating the energy from the economic and available resources has become very much essential nowadays. Bioenergy, solar energy is yet to prove their efficiency. Hence, we are proposing an idea of generation of the electric power by converting kinetic energy of flowing water in water pipe. This type of power generation is carried out here by one of the natural resources which is water, along with some necessary arrangement of turbines and pipes to produce the desired electric power efficiently. This proves to be one of the smart solutions of converting one form of energy to other and utilizing the converted energy as the basic need in everyday purposes.

Vegetables being the essential part of food need to be adequately included in our daily diet. It is a tedious and time- consuming work to cut vegetables for working class in their busy schedule. Everyone is interested in reducing the time of cooking by preserving the cut vegetables in their free time for future use. Hence there is a huge demand for ready to use fresh cut vegetables. One of the simplest methods is to preserve vegetables in the refrigerator, which is not an effective way. Cut vegetables do not retain real freshness as their flavour and taste reduces with time if it is preserved in refrigerator or kept open. Many methods were proposed by researchers to preserve the freshness of cut vegetables. Some of them include chlorine washing of vegetables, use of antioxidants and modified atmosphere packing. However, none have yet gained widespread acceptance by the industries and people. In this paper, an indigenous, simple and cost-effective method to preserve the freshness of the cut vegetables is proposed. Vegetables are preserved in specially designed glass chamber fitted with controlled suction unit and use them later when needed. This is a regulated method, where the gases liberated by the vegetables kept in glass chamber are pumped out at certain intervals of time by the suction motor. Suction motor is controlled by a relay and Arduino Uno microcontroller. In this way, both quality and freshness of cut vegetables and fruits are preserved.

Keywords: Turbines, Electrical Power, Turbine Flow, Kinetic Generation, Microcontroller, Suction Pump, Preserving Vegetables