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Potato-Powered Batteries Debut
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."
Or they could just eat them...
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.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
So does this mean we will be able to have our chips powered by chips?
No left turn unstoned.
Wow, what is it with Israel and weird battery technologies? Here's another story about some batteries made from sand and air. Not sure if anything came of that, either.
Qxe4
It's not an electrical grid, it's just a series of tubers.
They did, and right now the oil is killing all of our food :{
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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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.)
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Doesn't this consume copper like lemon batteries? Doesn't that have to be replaced too? No mention in the article.
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 an imbalance and halt the flow when it gets saturated. In a traditional potato, this is limited, in a boiled potato, it is ten times (or up to) more efficient/effective as the article claims.
Great, now the potato famine can cause blackouts too.
If Godzilla did not exist, man would have had to create him.
As far as I understand, this system is basically a zinc-air or zinc-water battery. What you get is a reaction like this:
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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Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
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 is a paid advertisement. Open your eyes.
20 GWh/year is pathethic. I know Sweden loves green energy and propagates excessively for it, but to put things in a different light consider this:
/rant
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.
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 were it used everywhere, as you suggest.
Please recalculate with more care. Also throw in the talent to build and maintain these power stations and clean up afterwards when they are obsolete.
Once you start buying food to make energy for a car or a home, food price skyrocket and developing nations only get poorer.
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 in terms of maintenance, portability, and time constraints.
4. We already have wind-up radios and solar solar powered devices. Conventional electronics still wouldn't work, because you can't plug potatoes into them, so you'd need extra gear just to use the craptastic consumer-level garbage devices which don't even last in suburbia for more than a year. It makes a lot more sense to use electronics specifically designed for harsh environments.
But the thing which makes this sick is that the scientists who came up with this potato thing are not stupid. They know all these problems exist, which begs the question; what is their real aim?
It sure isn't to create great battery technology so as to stymie their oil-rich neighbors. It's probably an attempt to generate some positive media spin for their university and by extension Israel, (green is good and people are too stupid to realize when they are being manipulated through media!) -That, combined with some underlying psychopathic desire to sell a bad bill of goods to people who are already hurting.
Yeah. So, thanks, Israel. If you wanted to make sure underprivileged people have electricity, perhaps you should NOT bomb their infrastructure while saying, "Look what you made me do with the bottle rockets our own Mossad organized you into firing at us so we could have an excuse to steal your land!"
Psychopaths blame the victims for their own crimes. That's the pattern. Look for it.
Anybody disagreeing with me simply hasn't done the research or is evil.
-FL