Potato-Powered Batteries Debut 284
MojoKid writes "Yissum Research Development Company Ltd., the technology transfer arm of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has just introduced what it's calling 'solid organic electric battery based upon treated potatoes.' In short, it's a potato-powered battery, and it's as real as you're hoping it is. The simple, sustainable, robust device can potentially provide an immediate inexpensive solution to electricity needs in parts of the world lacking electrical infrastructure. Researchers at the Hebrew University discovered that the enhanced salt bridge capability of treated potato tubers can generate electricity through means readily available in developing nations."
food (Score:3, Insightful)
Or they could just eat them...
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Or they could just eat them...
With NEW Shockingly Great Taste!
Re:food (Score:5, Funny)
Or they could just eat them...
+1 Insightful. If I am a 3rd world citizen, lacking food or means to purchase it, and I have some potatoes, and I am hungry and I have a flashlight or radio or whatever that needs juice, well, they are going to remain without power as I gobble down. Now if it was something like a person with an iPad, even if they are starving and impoverished, I think they would choose differently due to reality distortion fields. How they got the iPad I don't know, that is an exercise for the reader, and that reality distortion field is strong enough these days that there should be some sort of energy harvester for it in the works anyways.
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I'm currently seeking a grant to build a reactor based around Steve Jobs.
Harvesting the power of the distortion field is paramount to ending the world's oil addiction. Unfortunately, as he grows old we will find a new source to power the reactor. The boys in the lab have cooked up a cocktail of pheromones, viagra, ginseng and amphetamines to ensure we have a healthy stock of potential reactor rods.
Re:food (Score:5, Insightful)
NEWSFLASH - not everyone in developing nation is starving and short of food. For some, an alternative power source such as this is appropriate.
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bingo, I'm thinking of the farmers in remote villages in Africa that use cellphones to check market prices to determine when and where to bring their crops to market to optimize their income.
Yes, because they grow potatoes in the remote parts of Africa...I wish you were right afidel, but honestly most produce that "goes to market" comes from what one could dub superfarms it seems, at least those distribution companies that are publicly listed.
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Keep in mind, Africa is an agricultural and mining country. They don't (as an aggregate) lack food. They lack bargaining power (which communications can improve), good leaders (which can be improved by better education), infrastructure, transport, and a lot of other little things.
There are disaster-stricken areas where food drops are necessary, but most of Africa is trying to develop past that.
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[quote]Keep in mind, Africa is an agricultural and mining country[/quote]
Keep in mind Africa is a continent, not a country.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:food (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:food, and off topic (Score:5, Interesting)
In your friendly neighbourhood country of Finland, where nuclear power is not considered the spawn of all evil there is a project to add a third nuclear reactor to the Olkiluoto Nuclear power plant, the reactor when done will have a energy output of 1,720MW, this means that in 12 hours it produces more energy than your wonderful Örebro biogas plants yields in an entire year. If it is producing energy 70% of the year, that means it will net 10 TWh per year.
A price-performance comparision between the two yields the following: google tells me the biogas plant netted a cost of approximately 10million € (105M SEK), now this is quite a fair bit lower than the 3 billion € price of the reactor, but then again, the latter produces atleast 527 times more energy so adjusting the price for it we end up at 5,2 billion € for the equivalent biogas plant construction costs, these costs however does not factor in manpower and maintenance required, or say, the availibility of resources viable for biogas. Still, 5,2 billion is not all too bad compared what the equivalent windpower would cost, last i did the calculation i ended up at 3k wind plants per reactor with an annual maintenance cost of close to 100 million €, which is entirely unreasonable to have in practice and a reason why sweden is still importing coal generated electricty.
This comparison is also biased towards biogas, as the calculated value is total energy content and not the part that does any useful work. If you feel like recalculating the whole mess use 4300MW as the reactor value as that's the thermal output which makes for a more fair comparision.
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Fine, but do you numbers include the necessary infrastructure costs (plus maintenance) of electrical distribution? Moreover, what of the skills required to safely and temporarily store radio active waste, which we still cannot deal with effectively in the so-called developed world? Local or distributed sources of power might appear less efficient from a global perspective, however, too often that view is skewed towards not including real, long term costs. Plus Uranium will become increasingly expensive w
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Article says:
Thus, the boiled potato or other similarly treated vegetables could provide an immediate, environmental friendly and inexpensive solution to many of the low power energy needs in areas of the world lacking access to electrical infrastructure.
So that means they have the means to plant and they're well enough to be able to use an edible vegetable for energy.
Plus, they have no problems spending material for producing fire needed for cooking
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The power comes from galvanic action of the dissimilar metals; the potato is just the electrolyte/salt bridge.
This is truly a non-solution (pun un-intended) to the overall problem of generating electricity from batteries, just an observation that boiling the potatoes makes them a better salt bridge than raw potatoes, with no comparisons to salt bridges of batteries currently in use and no insight into obtaining or storin
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Re:food (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, many of them probably eat better than we do... less reliance on hyper-processed junk.
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NEWSFLASH - not everyone in developing nation is starving and short of food.
That's true.
But in a hot climate how long will it be before the boiled potato rots?
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Or they could just eat them...
+1 Insightful.
Or maybe +1 funny. The article is brief on details but it may be possible to have your potato as a battery and then eat it.
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Eat the potato and borrow a hand crank generator.
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I wonder how the two systems compare in terms of efficiency? Potato -> electricity has fewer steps than Potato -> muscle movement -> electricity so in theory it should have the edge.
But on the other hand, the human cranked version is based on proven components and it runs on a wide range of fuels - not just potatoes but rice, beer, bread, curry, pasta and beer.
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Really? You found a way to attack Apple and Steve Jobs on an article about using potatoes as batteries?!
Well, you're creative at least. I'll give you that much.
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I guess we need to rewrite Slashdot rule no. 1: "Any discussion could be used to bash Apple".
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Seriously, this guy's right. Think about it for a second. If I were a common resident of Africa (hardly able to call them 'citizens' in most cases), would I rather:
Have a source of electricity at night to use my electronics (so criminals will be able to see the inviting light, bringing them in for the plunder/rape/murder)
Or....
Have a meal.
That's hardly a difficult choice. Though, given the choice between "a potato you can eat" and "a potato for making electricity", I suspect much of Africa would prefer the
FOOD SHOULD BE SOLD FOR ENERGY (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:food (Score:4, Insightful)
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Precisely. Isn't the #1 problem in "developing 3rd world countries" there being enough food to go around, not electricity?
Nope.
We already produce enough food to go around, the #1 problem in developing countries is their political system. It tends to be tyrannical, and they tend to intentionally keep their people starving.
This is why these home-grown operations are being attempted - if the people don't have to rely on their government to make the tools to increase their production, then it becomes harder to oppress them.
Just think about what we do with electricity - it was a major revolution when it came about, and we use it f
Puff piece (Score:5, Informative)
There's nothing new about using vegetables as electrolytes, and all of the electricity is derived from the non-sustainable zinc and copper, not the boiled spud.
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I'm sure there's a significant way this differs from 50% of 4th grade science projects...
Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Informative)
Cost analyses showed that the treated potato battery generates energy, which is five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells, respectively. The clean light powered by this green battery is also at least 6 times more economical than kerosene lamps often used in the developing world.
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Which has already been done in this 500 potato array: http://latteier.com/potato/
Apparently the only real value of the potato is generating the acid necessary to serve as electrolyte, salt water can serve too so technically under this guy's definition the ocean is a battery.
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This cheap, easy to use green power source could substantially improve the quality of life of 1.6 billion people, comprising 32% of the developing non-OECD populations, currently lacking access to electrical infrastructure. Such a source can provide important needs, such as lighting, telecommunication, and information transfer.
But they're not marketing it as cheaper battery alternatives. They're proposing to use it to light light-bulbs and run computers. They're claiming this technology can compete with solar, wind, and geothermal power generation on the basis that it's "five to 50 folds cheaper than commercially available 1.5 Volt D cells and Energizer E91 cells, respectively".
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Sure it's cheaper, until they run out of zinc and copper and prices skyrocket.
Then they're fucked.
Re:Puff piece (Score:4, Funny)
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The bigger issue is that it takes power to refine the zinc and copper into nice pure little strips - probably more than you get back out from using it as a battery. You could probably recycle the materials, but again there's a cost.
Re:Puff piece (Score:4, Informative)
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Obviously I didn't read TFA, but I did look at the picture, and it does indeed look like a school project, even down the tape round the squared off potatoes. :-)
Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. This article is painfully embarrassing.
Yep... 1.6 billion people are going to boil potatoes and place them between sheets of copper and zinc in order to light an LED [hothardware.com]. Who writes this stuff?
Boiled potatoes sitting around for weeks. It's a revolution!
Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Funny)
Yep... 1.6 billion people are going to boil potatoes and place them between sheets of copper and zinc in order to light an LED
No, but I'd suggest that a few routinely go to similar lengths to do something better [wikipedia.org].
Cheers. ;-)
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Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I can put up with a lot of idiocy before I start to suspect malice, but this has gone too far. A potato battery article on slashdot, "news for nerds"? Kdawson is officially a troll.
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Kdawson is officially a troll.
This should be modded insightful not funny.
Re:Puff piece (Score:5, Funny)
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Indeed. Potato powered clocks [google.com]have been around for at least 25 years.
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So... more energy efficient... because it takes no energy at all to boil potatos?
Thanks, that made me chortle :) At first I agreed completely - it seems silly to waste energy boiling potatoes just to increase battery efficiency. Now that I think about it, though, you could boil them easily enough using a solar-cooker type device. I'm not sure what the availability of those is in the third-world, though. If they're not in wide use, I'd say teaching people how to make them would be a lot more useful than showing them how to make potato batteries.
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Yeah, except solar cookers could be used for other things, too. Like, you know, maybe ... cooking?
They're also something which can be constructed using basic tools and materials, by a third-world potato farmer who dropped out of school in grade 3. Solar panels and battery chargers ... not so much.
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You're right, fires are easy to come by. Unfortunately. The people that would supposedly benefit from this technology are the same people whose existence is threatened by deforestation and also air pollution from countless cooking fires.
Bottom line this has to be one of the most ecologically unfriendly and economically unsustainable "cheap energy" ideas out there.
Perpetual motion? (Score:2)
Obviously not. This might be a low cost way to turning some energy from an easily available form (wood to burn for cooking) into electricity. A lot of third world countries have excess lumber.
Chips? (Score:4, Funny)
Israel and batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
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They're trying to saturate the media with weird battery stories so that nobody notices them announcing that the country is switching over to electricity generated from the tears of Palestinian children. You didn't think they made Gaza into an open-air prison *just* because they're Nazis, did you?
Re:Israel and batteries (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Israel and batteries (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly because solar power is pretty big in Israel, so high tech batteries are in their best interest. And, just some baseless postulating here, but when you're surrounded by neighbors who don't much care for you whose biggest asset is oil, improving those alternative energy techniques might be a good idea. If Israel perfected solar power & storage, that could conceivably go a ways towards helping the world kick it's oil habit (solar powered batteries for your house and car), which would cut into the cashflow of said neighbors. So, batteries are good for them, and there is a chance that maybe possibly we're seeing some sort of scientific-economic-political strategy at work here.
Bulllllllllshit! (Score:3, Insightful)
So, batteries are good for them, and there is a chance that maybe possibly we're seeing some sort of scientific-economic-political strategy at work here.
Ugh.
The "Yissum Research Development Company Ltd." trying to sell this turd has come up with a way to turn a food source into a power source. Except, it doesn't work because. . .
1. The power comes from oxidization of metal and needn't involve potatoes at all. It could just as well be cow dung. Or a cup of salt water.
2. The potatoes need to be boiled first, so there's a huge amount of energy already being spent/wasted.
3. Potatoes rot and thus any power system would be saddled with ridiculous limitations i
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I could only wish what you think is true and Mossad would shot a bullet in your stupid head. Unfortunately, it's not and Israeli citizen will have to keep suffering with Hamas rockets falling in their heads.
One amazing thing about congenital psychopaths is that they have a marvelous facility for mangling language in such a way as to speak truth without their intending to.
It took me three readings to spot the glaring "WTF?" item in the above quote. This is largely because the normal human automatically forgives and tries to auto-correct their reading of other people's social faux-pas out of embarrassment on their behalf. Everybody makes typos, but "George Bush Jr." moments are special, they carry a certain fl
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You sounded pretty intelligent as long as you talked about science. Perhaps if you had done your research you would have known that most of Gaza's electricity is supplied by Israel, and most electricity outages in Gaza have been caused by Kassam rockets hitting electricity infrastructure in Israeli territory. (And of course, Israeli Electric Company technicians are sent to fix the problem, risking their lives to provide power to the very people attacking them!)
And you don't sound intelligent at all.
Points in order. . .
1. The Israeli air force bombed Gaza's primary power plant in 2006.
2. Power generation today rests on diesel availability. This is one of the many things Israel will not allow into Gaza.
3. Delivery infrastructure in Gaza is damaged (due to IDF bombing, not home-made rockets) and repair was slowed to a crawl because building materials are blocked from entering Gaza.
4. Your claim that black outs being due to Kassam rockets damaging Israeli infrastruc
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Israel has a penchant for technological advancement. Somebody there has decided that they need to make a better battery, but it's taking a little longer than usual. Come on, just dodge the odd potato prototypes and have some patience!
Great (Score:2)
If this takes on, this means another group of people who are going to starve so that others can use more energy. Can't someone invent an energy source that isn't based on food?
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They did, and right now the oil is killing all of our food :{
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
What you say would be true only if potato production were limited to current levels and if there were no surplus. In fact, potato production could be increased to accommodate use for batteries, and in any case th ere is actually a surplus. Total world food production is adequate - the reason that some people starve is poor distribution of the available food, in considerable part due to political reasons. (Starvation in North Korea, for example, is the result of the incompetence of the country's government.)
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I live in the midwest, and they said the same thing about corn and ethanol. Then corn prices went up, affecting the price of food sweeteners (it's not a coincidence that we have seen 'throwback' soft drinks using sugar in place of HFCS on the market recently) and food grade corn exported to poorer countries. As well as causing concerns about the amount of water used making the ethanol.
Just to be clear, corn into ethanol would not be profitable without subsidies. When you say "then corn prices went up" you're leaving out the most important part of the whole equation. Without the corn subsidies corn would only be worth growing as a food crop and people wouldn't be having problems getting fed for lack of corn.
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If this takes on, this means another group of people who are going to starve so that others can use more energy.
Yep. Isn't evolution wonderful?
What's that you say, Senator Stevens? (Score:5, Funny)
It's not an electrical grid, it's just a series of tubers.
I wonder... (Score:2)
...if you overcharge or short this out, will it smell like french fries?
Ooooorrr.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want energy, you could ferment them tatties, distill good 'ol CH3CH2OH and burn it. You might get more watt-hours/spud this way and there'd be no electrodes to replace.
Now, if you actually need small, cheaply refillable batteries for portable devices, this would be nice provided the electrodes don't wear out too much.
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Unfortunately, the electrodes *do* wear out too much. The zinc, iirc, is the real consumable in a potato battery, not the potato itself.
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Platinum-based catalysts are expensive, so practical exploitation of ethanol as fuel for a PEM fuel cells requires a new catalyst. New nanostructured electrocatalysts (HYPERMEC by ACTA SpA for example) have been developed, which are based on non-noble metals, preferentially mixtures of Fe, Co, Ni at the anode, and Ni, Fe or Co alone at the cathode.
Even if some university comes up with this plant, we're talking about "developing" (some euphemism!) countries that may not have access to the seeds, or the doping metal. Anyone can rig a fermenter and a still.
Can anyone suggest a simple heat engine for the alcohol?
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Yup! Freshly sliced tatties (or some other suitable tuber, come to think of it) go into the cells, and the spent slices go into the fermenter along with other available biomass that farm animals won't eat.
Power from Zinc/Copper?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't this consume copper like lemon batteries [wikipedia.org]? Doesn't that have to be replaced too? No mention in the article.
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---
Batteries Feeds [feeddistiller.com] @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
How Long before we can buy (Score:2)
The Tesla Tuber Turbo?
Technology dependence (Score:3, Funny)
Great, now the potato famine can cause blackouts too.
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potato famine
Too soon, too soon. People still sensitive about that one.
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People still sensitive about that one.
All three of them?
Thank you Don Herbert! (Score:2)
I remember Mr. Wizard using a potato to generate small amounts of electricity when the show aired on Nickelodeon in the 80's when I was a kid.
Lalande and Daniell Could Do It Much Better (Score:5, Informative)
2Zn + O2 -> 2ZnO (zinc air)
Zn + H2O -> ZnO + H2 (zinc water)
The potato is decorative, and simply acts as the electrolyte, the copper is also decorative and simply acts as substrate for the air or water reaction (it could be iron, nickel or even a graphite rod). Their are using copper, as far as I understand, because it is cheap. The copper won't be consumed. The potato won't be consumed, unless it rots. It will eventually be filled with zinc oxide, which will "clog" the electrolyte. So basically, you'll save the copper until it corrodes (likely never because the zinc protecting it from corrosion), and replace the zinc constantly. My guess is that you'll eventually have to replace the potato, but not as often as the zinc. Part of the problem with this system is that the copper is not oxidized - instead of copper wire, you need copper rust. What you really want in such a system is this:
Zn + CuO -> ZnO + Cu
That's what the Lalande cell does. It was used in the late 1880's and 90's to power stuff like telegraphs. Instead of a potato, they used an alkaline electrolyte, like potassium hydroxide. This is way, way better at conducting electricity than a potato. Before the Lalande cell, we had the Daniell cell. The Daniell cell was based on a similar construction, but it used sulphuric acid instead of potassium hydroxide. Sulfuric acid dissolves both copper and zinc oxides, which lead to problems because some of the copper sulfate would make it across to the zinc. This would lead to the corrosion of the zinc, and the copper plating of the zinc, stopping further reaction. To resolve this, a porous bot or salt bridge had to be used to stop the copper from getting the the zinc. Unfortunately, although zinc-copper is a cheap chemistry with high energy density, it is tough to recharge successfully. This is because when the reaction is reversed, and zinc oxide is changed to metallic zinc, the zinc plate will change shape. This will cause the shorting of the battery, and its destruction. Zinc-copper is not really used all that much these days. Zinc manganese appears to have replaced it because it is cheap and has higher energy. It still has the same recharging problems, and if we could solve em', lithium would be out of business.
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And people are using zinc-air fuel cells for some fairly substantial applications [electric-fuel.com]. I suppose that's it's cheaper to just deliver the appropriate small zinc plates to an outlying village and let them use locally-grown vegetables as the electrolyte. But it would seem that there are advantages to dropping off some large well-designed fully-charged fuel cells, and picking up the spent ones for recharging or recycling at a centralized facility. Otherwise, I have visions of every village eventually having a "zin
This is a press release (Score:2, Informative)
You really think someone submitted this news to Slashdot and then got accepted?
Do your research. This is a press-release from Businesswire, a news agency.
It's like this: You want people to pay attention to your "news", you pay a PR agency u$s 5000 to u$s 10000 and they send your "news" to their buddies at Reuters, Asocciated Press or Businesswire.
All newspapers, TVs (And reporters like kdawson) are subscribed to this news "collectors" and they pick up the news they want. It has been like this for years.
This
TOTL (Score:2)
http://totl.net/Spud/ [totl.net]
reminds me of this satire that was created by some university friends of mine in the 90s, it was picked up by the main stream news and they were interviewed, linked constantly. It was, of course, a joke - and eventually bogged down the the constant phone calls and links they were freely saying so on their site and begging for it all to stop...
and of course, they were slashdotted: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/21/1947222&mode=thread [slashdot.org]
Mod me a schlemiel already, and ask me if I care! (Score:2)
Oy vey, are potatoes kosher?
Debian (Score:2)
I knew they would find a way to run Linux on batteries some day.
The Two Potato Clock is decades old (Score:2)
Am I the only one who had the "Two Potato Clock" when they were a kid?
http://www.enasco.com/product/SB16423M [enasco.com]
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The news here appears to be the discovery that boiling the potatoes increases their utility for batteries considerably. 4th grade science project potato batteries use raw potatoes, don't they?
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You didn't either.
What they did was manipulate the salt bridge in the potato in a way that increased the output by ten fold. They found this was as simple to do as boiling the potato. Basically, they took something already known, and known to be limited, and raised those limits until it became somewhat practical for use in some situations.
In case you do not know what a salt bridge is, it's a conduit that allows ions to pass from one side of the battery's reaction to the other so the electrons do not create
Mod parent up (Score:2, Interesting)
Articles should be color-coded just like submissions, and if it drops below the top color or two it should go off the front page for non-logged-in users.
Logged in users should of course be able to set their own color threshold.
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As has already been pointed out, these are copper and zinc powered batteries.
With a cheap and readily available electrolyte.
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how much Zinc and Copper , how much potatoe, how many Amp-hours
and not to forget: what are the waste products - toxic? how to recycle?
-
for me the potatoe is just providing the elctrolyte, the energy still comes from the electrochemistry of the metals zinc and copper!
- Dear Mr. Volta, it is time that you dig up your patent again! *g*
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Somebody... like an idiot? Yes.
Somebody with eyes and a brain, you mean. If you had a valid point, you wouldn't post as an AC.
-FL