<
https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-researchers-turn-wine-into-a-battery-storage-breakthrough/>
"Leftover wine and overripe citrus fruit could be used to create powerful
batteries after Australian chemists uncovered a fresh use for food acids.
Researchers from the University of NSW announced they had been granted a patent
for the technology that they say could be used to power everything from
smartphones and electric vehicles to household solar storage in future.
But the academics will first have to scale up the technology from the size of a
coin to a much larger product.
The battery discovery came after a university PhD candidate discovered
inconsistencies in the way food acids reacted to metal.
The team in the UNSW science department then started experimenting with
different types of food acid, Professor Neeraj Sharma told
AAP, and found it
could be used to create an anode – one of three major battery components.
“The anode is one of the biggest contributors to cost, toxicity, all of those
things in terms of battery processing,” he said.
“We can make that quite environmentally friendly, sustainable, and give it more
punch than what it currently has.”
Prof Sharma said researchers had tested their technology with tartaric acid and
malic acid that is found in wine, as well as citric acid that is common to
fruits.
The acids could be “tuned” in combination with metals, he said, to produce
different types of energy storage, including batteries that charged or
discharged faster than normal, or that stored more power for a longer time.
The food acids could also be processed using water rather than harsh chemicals,
and could be extracted from food and beverage waste streams to ensure the
batteries were significantly more sustainable.
“You don’t want to target household waste because you have quite a variability
but if you have a single source like wine or citrus waste, you can have scale,”
Prof Sharma said.
“From that you can extract your acid, combine it with iron that you get from
the Pilbara, for example, and Bob’s your uncle, you have an anode that you can
drop into a lithium-ion battery.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
