Till now, we all used to charge batteries with the electricity medium. Have you ever thought of charging it with a food product ? I guess the answer is NO in most of the cases. But the professors from College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech have given it a thought.
They have developed Sugar-powered batteries.
Sugar, the generalized name for sweet content used in our food. These are basically short chain, soluble carbohydrates.Sugar is an important source of energy. During digestion. all food carbohydrates are broken into single molecular sugars. These sugars are absorbed from the intestines into the blood streams from where they travel to the cells, where they are used to provide energy for cellular functions.
The researchers are being using this energy giving feature of sugar in the batteries. The Sugar battery runs on maltodextrin, something you may have seen on an ingredients list is on a food label.
It is basically made by cooking down starch. The battery uses enzymes as a catalyst to strip electrons from the maltodextrin and create a current.
Features of the Sugar Battery :
- Really a rechargeable fuel cell more than a typical battery, but one that runs on super ordinary stuff i.e sugar.
- More efficient than regular batteries and do not require any toxins.
- Could last at least 10 times longer than currently working lithium ion batteries.
Thus, through this research we can say that nature itself is a bulk source of energy which never vanishes off. We can rely on nature for our all needs but have to think about the way of extracting benefits of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment