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Powering Phones, PCs Using Sugar
Nerval's Lobster writes "A team of researchers at Virginia Tech University have developed a battery with energy density an order of magnitude higher than lithium-ion batteries, while being almost endlessly rechargeable and biodegradable as well – because it's made of sugar. The battery is an enzymatic biofuel fuel cell – a type of fuel cell that uses a catalyst to strip molecules from molecules of a fuel material. Instead of using platinum or nickel for catalysts, however, biofuel cells use the catalysts made from enzymes similar to those used to break down and digest food in the body. Sugar is a good fuel material because it is energy dense, easy to obtain and transport, and so simple to biodegrade that almost anything biological can eat it. Sugar-based fuel cells aren't new, but existing designs use only a small number of enzymes that don't oxidize the sugar completely, meaning the resulting battery can hold only small amounts of energy that it releases slowly. A new design that uses 13 enzymes that can circulate freely to get better access to sugar molecules, however, is able to store energy at a density of 596 amp-hours per kilogram – an order of magnitude higher than lithium-ion batteries, according to Y.H. Percival Zhang, who studies biological systems engineering at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. "Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature," Zhang said in a statement announcing publication in Nature Communications of his paper describing the battery. "So it's only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an environmentally friendly way to produce a battery.""
Sweet!
Maltodextrin/glucose is a start, but wake me up when it can use sucrose.
So the free market will do what New York couldn't with taxes...drive the price of junk food up! Sweet.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Watt hours would be more helpful. Amp hours are meaningless without associated volts.
If this thing takes off, I can imagine in a few years the highly subsidized corn industry trying to sell high concentration fructose batteries, marketing them as "corn sugar fuel cells".
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...the first commercial example. Until then I'll forget about this annoucement since a laboratory curiosity can take a long time to wind its way to commerical production if it ever makes it that far.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
You thought computer viruses were bad, wait until you have to deal with computer diabetes...
Correct. That's not energy density. They need to state it in Watt hours per kilogram, or state the voltage they are assuming.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If the battery is based off enzymatic reactions won't temperature be a massive variable?
The linked abstract indicates around 0.25 mW/cm^2 (electron exchange membrane area). I'm not in any way a fuel cell expert, but that seems kind of low. Other fuel cells get from 0.2 to 2 Watts (not mW) /cm^2.
Sure, sugar has a high energy density, and this project uses it efficiently. But the batteries would be huge, to get reasonable power.
First you get the sugar
Then you get the power
Then you get the women.
God spoke to me
We already know that using ethanol is a big resource wasing flop
It is only resource wasting when made from corn. Ethanol from sugar cane is very sensible. But America has high tariffs on cane sugar, and the ethanol derived from it, to keep it from competing with corn. We will not have a sensible bio-fuels policy until the first presidential caucuses are moved out of Iowa.
This sounds like it would be prefect for implantable devices, that could leach off excess sugar in the blood.
With the high sugar content in western diets, one could both power implanted devices, plus prevent and treat diabetes by keeping blood sugar levels down to reasonable levels. It could act like an artificial pancreas, plus power a pacemaker, and maybe let you use a computer in your head. (Why isn't the NSA funding this, to stop thought crimes?)
Seems to me a much easier solution than forcing the political powerful processed food and fast food industries to cut back on sugar and syrup that are poisoning consumers.
So what are the disadvantages compared to a LIon battery? Does it need much maintenance (such as replacing the sugar)? Can you just plug it into the wall to charge like a normal rechargeable battery? How is the lifespan (cycles) and how quickly does it charge? Is there much vampire drain? How much power can it produce (W/kg)? Is the tech there yet or are there still obstacles to overcome? How cheaply can these be made?
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It's not a battery. It's a fuel cell. The reaction is not internally reversible. Once all the accessible sugar has been oxidized, you need new sugar to refuel it. It doesn't recharge. Most likely you wouldn't bother to refuel it at all. You'd treat it as a disposable that you simply replace, like an alkaline cell. The quoted 596 Ah/kg compares very favorably to the 92 Ah/kg of an alkaline. Of course, that's comparing a theoretical charge density calculated from lab equipment to a product. By the time you squeeze the lab equipment into the AA or AAA form factor, you can expect that quoted 596 to suffer rather badly.
I'd argue that it isn't a failure of our distribution system so much as it is a failure of unchecked capitalism. For example, US consumers' demand for quinoa has pushed the price up so far that the people who used to survive on it (Peruvians, Bolivians) can no longer afford to eat it. http://www.theguardian.com/com...
The rich will always exploit the poor to whatever extent they can get away with. In this case, it means that a small group profits from foreign demand while the laborers suffer. It's the same as "blood diamonds" - perfectly normal "free market" foreign demand may send capital to the region, but increases human suffering.
"We already know that using ethanol is a big resource wasing flop, where do you think the ethanol comes from? Yeast and sugar. Going one step up isn't going to help,"
The energy cost of distillation would be avoided with a corn syrup fuel cell. That's worth quite a bit economically.
I remember reading stories about fuel cells for laptops (powered by alcohol) during the first year of Slashdot. And, supposedly, such cells were going to be sold for popular laptop models in "a few months." Twenty or so years later, I'm still waiting.
If a fuel cell idea is still completely, and totally, lab-bound, it is unlikely to become a product in the next 15-20 years or so, if previous progress on the subject is any guide.
The voltage is immaterial. The energy density stage same regardless of the voltage, since amp-hours s au it of charge, indent of how much current or voltage is actually used. If you hold voltage and current constant, you can always do more work with more charge, so charge/kg is a reasonable representation of energy density.
You're talking about comparing across battery types, then your statement holds only when voltage is the same. Also, for EVs the only metric that really matters is energy per volume. kWh-hrs (or MJ) per liter, eg. Energy per mass isn't a constraint. Show me a significant boost in this metric, including the size of the "sugar sack" needed to go 120 miles, then we'll talk.
I'm not sure where your thinking process is broken, but I'll give it a try.
Amp-hours isn't a statement of energy. For example, you could have 2 '5 amp-hour' batteries, but because one is 12V and the other 6V, the amount of energy each contains is very different, with the 12V one being able to supply twice as much energy before becoming exhausted. Because this is a new battery technology, we don't know what the voltage of the battery is.
Watts are a statement of power, Joules are a statement of energy, or power over time. Amps are mostly a statement of volume of electron flow. Without knowing the force behind them(voltage), you can't say how much work you can do with them.
I don't read AC A human right
This is a fuel cell, not a battery. It can't be recharged without refueling it. The enzymes are probably what breaks down, so you'd need to put more in. Since they break down rapidly (as most enzymes do) that means making them locally. You can't just plug these into the wall to recharge them, you have to empty and refuel them.
Not a sentence!
Now if the voltage was specified, we might manage to convert amp-hours into energy. Otherwise there is little point in giving a figure at all.
Perhaps the full article mentions that somewhere but there's no way I'm paying $35 just to find out.
If anyone ever develops an energy source powered by vaporous product claims, we'll be good forever.
If you would simply read the damn abstract (no money needed for that) it already states the following: a maximum power output of 0.8mW/cm^2 and a maximum current density of 6mA/cm^2. Now you have Power (in W) and Amperage (in A). Simply divide to get Voltage (V).
1. it doesn't work
2. it can't be produced (= it can't get cheap enough)
or
3. someone has a deep interest in blocking it (think NiMH)
Or:
4. It's just been invented.
Jeez, guys. There's still some substantial engineering to do between finding a reaction that works and deploying it as a product.
Look at how long it took for Edison to turn electric-driven incandescence into a practical light bulb - and how rapidly that deployed once it was finally done. Or look at the several generations of automobiles between the first hand-built, otto-cycle engine driven rich-guy's toys and Ford's mass-produced models, or the several generations of steam engines before practical, standards-based, inexpensive railroad transportation was deployed.
If this proves practical and deploys I expect it in a lot less time than the above examples. But I DON'T expect it to already be deployed for years before the week the first published paper describing the fundamental breakthrough is published.
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That's still quite a problem when the cell voltage is 0.13 (remember, the cm^2 terms cancel). You'd need to stack 28 cells to get to the nominal LiIon voltage.
Converting the impressive sounding 590 Ah/kg to to the more useful Wh/kg, we get a much less impressive sounding 76 Wh/kg. LiIon is 100-250 Wh/kg depending on exact formulation.