Charging with plant wastes

Charging with plant wastes

World's smelliest fruit could charge your mobile phone

World's smelliest fruit could charge your mobile phone

In this era of life, where imagination come into reality we can imagine that if we use plants to produce and store electricity which would be used to charge different electric devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops and even electric cars.

Now a days this innovated idea comes into reality and by the efforts of researchers of university of Sydney this is possible to produce electricity and then to use this electricity to charge our mobile phones, tablets and laptop with the wastes of different fruits.

Academic associate professor Vincent Gomes in the school of chemical and biochemical engineering at university of Sydney explains that how he and his coworkers try to make the idea a reality and how they managed to turn the tropical fruits into super capacitors.

Let’s know that what is the working method of these innovative techniques. Professor explained that they bought durian and jackfruits from the market and we used the waste of these fruits to convert it into a super capacitor. This capacitor can be used to store electricity.

Aerogel is an extremely light and porous synthetic material used for a range of applications. In this technology of turning plants into super capacitor a non hazardous and non toxic method of green engineering was used to heating the biomass of fruits in water and dry freezing, in this way the fruits durians and jackfruit were transformed into aerogels. These aerogels produced by this method were stable carbon aerogels.

Stable carbon aerogels are highly porous so that these can make great super capacitors. These aerogels produced from fruits were then used to make electrodes and then these electrodes were tested for their energy storage properties and the results of this testing were exceptional.

What are super-capacitors?

Professor Vincent Gomes told that super capacitors are a type of energy reservoirs which can dole out energy smoothly. They store energy in a small battery sized device very quickly. A large amount of energy is stored by these super capacitors and then these supply this energy to charge electronic devices such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets and electric cars etc. within a few seconds.

Batteries vs super capacitors 

When we compare conventional batteries with these super capacitor then we come to know that these super capacitors are able to charge devices very fast comparatively and besides these super capacitors have greater magnitude of charging cycles than the other conventional charging devices or batteries.

These super capacitors are made of activated carbon and it is predicted by Associate Professor Gomes that this activated carbon found in these super capacitors is most efficient Ming other activated carbons and the other activated carbon are very far from these carbons by capacity.

Why durian and jack fruit?

The answer of this question is that these fruits have a natural template of such type which is very suitable to make porous aerogels. The waste of durian was used as it is naturally excellent for this purpose.

The performance of these super capacitors made of durian and jackfruit is much better than the other devices are being used now a days to charge electric devices. If these are not better than any device then that is very expensive and exotic graphene based material.

Durian fruit waste is such a thing that people want to get rid from it as soon as possible due to its repulsive, nauseous smell. This is an affordable source of energy and a way to transform our waste into useful product in this way this process plays an important role in reducing pollution. This process reduce the cast of energy by the process of chemical free , green synthetic protocol.

What could this technology be used for?

The world now has reached at a point where there is a lot of pollution and a high threat of increase in global warming. At this stage we should contribute to lower these threats by reducing the use of chemical and we should use natural resources to produce energy in a natural way. 

So at this point these super capacitors are ideal products for daily use. To reduce the depletion of natural fossil fuels these super capacitors are playing their role by providing high efficiency charging in no cast.