http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/01/sweet-science-researcher-develops-energy-dense-sugar-battery?cmpid=WNL-Friday-January24-2014
Sweet Science: Researcher Develops Energy-dense Sugar Battery
Zeke Barlow, Virginia Tech
January 23, 2014
A Virginia Tech research team has developed a battery that runs on sugar
and has an unmatched energy density, a development that could replace
conventional batteries with ones that are cheaper, refillable, and
biodegradable.
The findings from Y.H. Percival Zhang, an associate professor of
biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences and the College of Engineering, were published today in the
journal Nature Communications.
While other sugar batteries have been developed, this one has an energy
density an order of magnitude higher than others, allowing it to run
longer before needing to be refueled, Zhang said.
In as soon as three years, Zhang's new battery could be running some of
the cell phones, tablets, video games, and the myriad other electronic
gadgets that require power in our energy-hungry world, Zhang said.
"Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature," Zhang said. "So
it's only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an
environmentally friendly way to produce a battery."
In America alone, billions of toxic batteries are thrown away every
year, posing a threat to both the environment and human health,
according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Zhang's development
could help keep hundreds of thousands of tons of batteries from ending
up in landfills.
This is one of Zhang's discoveries in the last year that utilize a
series of enzymes mixed together in combinations not found in nature. He
has published articles on creating edible starch from non-food plants
and developed a new way to extract hydrogen in an economical and
environmentally friendly way that can be used to power vehicles.
In this newest development, Zhang and his colleagues constructed a
non-natural synthetic enzymatic pathway that strip all charge potentials
from the sugar to generate electricity in an enzymatic fuel cell. Then,
low-cost biocatalyst enzymes are used as catalyst instead of costly
platinum, which is typically used in conventional batteries.
Like all fuel cells, the sugar battery combines fuel — in this case,
maltodextrin, a polysaccharide made from partial hydrolysis of starch —
with air to generate electricity and water as the main byproducts.
"We are releasing all electron charges stored in the sugar solution
slowly step-by-step by using an enzyme cascade," Zhang said.
Different from hydrogen fuel cells and direct methanol fuel cells, the
fuel sugar solution is neither explosive nor flammable and has a higher
energy storage density. The enzymes and fuels used to build the device
are biodegradable.
The battery is also refillable and sugar can be added to it much like
filling a printer cartridge with ink.
--
Darryl McMahon
Success is sweet.
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