Biobatteries
Posted: 09 Feb 2019 08:57
Not sure if anyone has covered this in the past, but i just recently came across this amazing discovery and felt the need to share. Who knows, by shedding light on the research topic, more and more people might develop new and more efficient technology from looking at the advances of others.
I was looking up ways of building my own capacitor/battery ("Baghdad Battery" style) for powering small electronics and came across this article describing "Biobatteries". I had never heard the term before and was intrigued. Doing more research on the topic, i discovered that these particular batteries run off of sugar-based things such as Glucose and Maltodextrin. This got me curious on how to recreate my own battery because of the abundance cheap cost of sugars and the fact that it's (As Far As I Know) a very green source of energy. Along with this, it is also stated that these batteries drastically out-perform Lithium Ion cells, powering a phone for 10 days instead of one. I had heard of this "Soda Powered Phone" a long time ago (around 2010-2011 or so) and simply thought it was a harmless, well designed april fools joke. Had i known it was real i would have been doing my research back then instead of now. The chief researcher (By the name of Y.H. Percival Zhang) stated that the batteries could be commercialized in 3 years back in 2014 and Sony was also able to create a functional battery that worked by simply adding a sugar solution to it.
On a fascinating note, these glucose based batteries might be the future for powering implants. For instance MIT researchers have created just such a fuel cell in order to power implanted brain-computer interfaces. As i don't like to plagiarize people, i will leave the link to this research topic below as well.
Links to findings:
Sugar Batteries: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175 ... on-enzymes
Sony Sugar Battery: https://books.google.no/books?id=IBzSBQ ... &q&f=false
Soda Powered Phone: https://www.greenoptimistic.com/modifie ... -20100115/
MIT Glucose Fuel Cell: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130 ... interfaces
I was looking up ways of building my own capacitor/battery ("Baghdad Battery" style) for powering small electronics and came across this article describing "Biobatteries". I had never heard the term before and was intrigued. Doing more research on the topic, i discovered that these particular batteries run off of sugar-based things such as Glucose and Maltodextrin. This got me curious on how to recreate my own battery because of the abundance cheap cost of sugars and the fact that it's (As Far As I Know) a very green source of energy. Along with this, it is also stated that these batteries drastically out-perform Lithium Ion cells, powering a phone for 10 days instead of one. I had heard of this "Soda Powered Phone" a long time ago (around 2010-2011 or so) and simply thought it was a harmless, well designed april fools joke. Had i known it was real i would have been doing my research back then instead of now. The chief researcher (By the name of Y.H. Percival Zhang) stated that the batteries could be commercialized in 3 years back in 2014 and Sony was also able to create a functional battery that worked by simply adding a sugar solution to it.
On a fascinating note, these glucose based batteries might be the future for powering implants. For instance MIT researchers have created just such a fuel cell in order to power implanted brain-computer interfaces. As i don't like to plagiarize people, i will leave the link to this research topic below as well.
Links to findings:
Sugar Batteries: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175 ... on-enzymes
Sony Sugar Battery: https://books.google.no/books?id=IBzSBQ ... &q&f=false
Soda Powered Phone: https://www.greenoptimistic.com/modifie ... -20100115/
MIT Glucose Fuel Cell: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130 ... interfaces




