Back to EVOKE after a hard week of work, I'm now determined to make up the time I lost, and to work hard as the good agent I'm expected to be.
Sadly, I'm experiencing how hard it is, when remaining behind schedule, to find facts which were not already reported by other agents. At first I choosed to talk about Desertec, as the idea involved Carlo Rubbia, an Italian Nobel Prize in Physics. That would have been a good example of ENTERPRENEURSHIP with LOCAL INSIGHT, but agent Jan Lampe already talked about it in a good post, which I'd suggest you to read: Sahara Solar Plant. Then I thought I could publish something about human sourced electricity, but I found that many applications were already reported, beyond which there was always the same princilpe: (I'll be posting something about that as a secondary mission, though, because I think it is the most interesting solution, for short term design applications). Finally, I remembered of something I posted on my ITgG blog about sugar batteries, a few years ago and I thought it would be nice to see if the idea developed further, and how.
When I wrote the article, researchers at Saint Louis University (lead by Shelley Minteer, who's my POWER PLAYER by now) had developed a fuel cell battery that ran on virtually any sugar source (from soft drinks to tree sap) and has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium ion batteries. Their study
showed that renewable fuels can be directly employed in batteries at room temperature to lead to more energy-efficient battery technology than metal-based approaches. What was astonishing and encouraging about this research, unlike other fuel cells all of the materials used to build the sugar battery are biodegradable, demonstrating that a better battery that's also cleaner for the environment can be built, by bridging biology and chemistry.
The concept at the base of the sugar bio-batteries is, like other fuel cells, to use enzymes for converting fuel (in this case, sugar) into electricity, leaving behind water as a main byproduct. The principle is further explained in an article by Sony, where they presented their solution to power up an MP3 player.
I began searching around for more recent news and I must confess I found less than I expected; but researchers are still working on this, which probably means the idea is worthing even if it asks for longer times to be efficiently applied to common devices.
Sony itself presented a new prototype, on February 2009, at the International Hydrogen & Fuel Cell Expo (or FC Expo) as reported in Shinichi Kato's article on Tech-on. According to the article, this time Sony doubled the battery's output density per unit volume achieved by the previous model.
Also, young designer Daizi Zheng developed a concept for Nokia, where sugar batteries are adopted. On her prohject's webpage she writes:
conventional phone batteries are expensive, harmful to the environment and difficult to dispose of. In addition, the conventional battery manufacturing process consumes many valuable resources. [...] In order to use the bio-battery as a power source for the phone all that is required is a small supply of a sugary drink. Once the battery dies only oxygen and water remains.
Finally, as reported by inhabitots, toy manufacturer Tomy has developed a prototype model of a toy vehicle which runs on electric power generated from Sony's bio battery. At the Toy Forum in Tokyo, Jan the 19th 2010, a Tomy employee showed how the battery was fed a soft drink as its energy source. The toy can work on any sugary drink.
Conclusions to this research are not highly encouraging for short term applications: it is not realistic to feed up an MP3 player with batteries which are bigger than the music device itself.
By now, only very small devices (probably only gadgets and toys) can be fed up with sugar batteries. But on a long term, if acceptable efficiency rates will be reached, the outcomes for such a technology could be outstanding.
And maybe one day we could really see something like this happening:
Interesting, II think it is the same concept as the blog I posted about MFC and Beer Batteries, hmm, defineteley worth looking into, who knows with all the people working on nanotechnology making this micro may be very possible on the future.
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