You soon will be able to recharge the battery of your cell phone with sugar, thanks to two researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) who developed the world's first efficient "bacterial battery.". The Agence France Presse reports on this discovery in "Bugpower, the energy of the future."
In a Pentagon-backed project, University of Massachusetts researchers Swades Chaudhuri, an Indian, and Derek Lovley, an American, say the battery's source is an underground bacterium that gobbles up sugar and converts its energy into electricity.
Their prototype device ran flawlessly without refuelling for up to 25 days and is cheap and stable.
Now, let's go for some technical details.
The bug in question is Rhodoferax ferriducens, which was found in airless sediment deep below ground at a terrestrial site at Oyster Bay, Virginia, and identified as a promising candidate for oxidising simple sugars.
The two scientists, whose work is published on Sunday in the specialist journal Nature Biotechnology, set up a small two-chambered vessel, with each side containing a graphite electrode and separated by a membrane.
Of course, this kind of microbial fuel cells is not new, but until now, they were very inefficient. This one is different.
Its energy efficiency is an extraordinary 83 percent, which implies that, if engineering obstacles can be overcome and manufacturing techniques devised, it could one day be as compact as household batteries.
The researchers think the device must be improved before turning into commercial products. But they hope it will be a good solution for people living in poor or rural communities.
For more information, you can read this UMass press release, "UMass Scientists Use Microbes to Generate Electricity". The abstract of their research paper, "Electricity generation by direct oxidation of glucose in mediatorless microbial fuel cells" is also available.
Source: Agence France Presse, September 9, 2003
1:07:51 PM Permalink
|
|
