In Germany, they created accumulators of rotten apples
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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Spoiled apples as a source of energy, at first glance seems an absurd idea, but at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, a group of researchers decided to use this material to create cheap sodium-ion batteries with high performance. Probably, the technology proposed by German researchers can be called the greenest of all existing today.
The invention can be used as a simple and affordable energy store, and with the development of technology, sodium-ion batteries based on rotten apples will be able to compete with lithium-ion batteries, which are now widely used in portable electronic devices and small electric vehicles.
Strict rejection (by size, color and other external defects) leads to the fact that after harvesting apples there is a rather large number of unsuitable fruits, which, like a perishable product, are almost immediately sent for recycling. By the way, in Europe the problem of waste after harvesting is quite acute, some fruits and vegetables rot quickly enough and they can not even be put into animal feed, small private companies offer different ways of solving the problem, but their efforts are usually not enough.
Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute Stefano Passerini and Daniel Buchholz proposed an unusual and useful appointment to spoiled apples. Dried fruits represent 95% of the carcass, from which "hyperplane carbon" is produced - an electrode with a low cost and high productivity.
Specialists were able to create on the basis of "apple carbon" an anode that has a specific capacity of 230 mAh / g and retains its original properties even after 1000 cycles of discharge and battery charge.
Scientists noted that the percentage of capacity that is lost after discharge - battery charge (the so-called Coulomb efficiency of electrodes) was established at a rather high level - 99.1%.
In the course of the work, scientists also created a cathode for the "apple" battery, which is environmentally friendly and of high performance - the oxide in several layers made it possible to obtain a material that can be compared with lithium-ion cathodes, but with several differences - a charge safety of 90.2% after more more than 500 cycles and an efficiency of more than 99.9%.
Lithium-ion batteries can save a large amount of energy, but they contain life-threatening materials, for example cobalt, and the cost of such energy storage devices is quite high.
Sodium-ion batteries are cheaper and are made from simple and affordable materials, but in performance they are in no way inferior to lithium-ion batteries.
According to Professor Passerini, sodium-ion batteries are about 20% worse than lithium-ion batteries, but the new development practically compares the battery capacities.
To date, despite the low cost, sodium-ion batteries are not very common, but scientists are confident that their development is due to availability and cheapness will be the most used anode material.
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