Day after day, mounds of old and worn out electronic devices known as “e-waste” are accumulating around us, prompting researchers to find innovative ways to reduce the amount of this waste, and now, a team of scientists has created a non-rechargeable water-powered battery And made from paper and other sustainable materials.
Landfills all around us are littered with leftover wires, screens, and batteries that make up our electronic devices, as well as plastic, metal and other materials that are wrapped in these devices. Electronic devices are widespread, but there are other more dangerous electronic waste containing non-rechargeable batteries, such as disposable electronic medical diagnostic kits, environmental sensors, radio-tracking chips, and other equipment.
“Small batteries cause big problems, because no one cares what happens after they expire,” says Dele Ogensaitan, a professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine, an environmental technology researcher and consultant to major tech companies, who was not involved in creating the paper battery.
Now researchers at the Laboratory of Cellulosic and Wood Materials of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) are working to solve this little-known problem. This week, they published a paper in Scientific Reports. Scientific Reports They presented this new water-powered paper battery, which they created from environmentally friendly materials, and this battery may later become a sustainable alternative to the more dangerous dry batteries, which are currently commonly used in low-power devices.
The new paper battery contains the basic components of regular batteries, but they are assembled differently, and as with chemical batteries, the new battery consists of a positively charged electrode called the “cathode” and a negatively charged electrode called “the anode”, and between them is an electrically conductive material called “electrolyte” “, in addition to a plastic or metal layer that encases these components. In the new battery, the anode and cathode are inks printed on the front and back of a paper clip saturated with salt, which dissolves as soon as the paper is wetted with water, as the saline solution resulting from this process plays the role of an electrolyte.
Since the beginning of the experiment, researchers have decided to be satisfied with sustainable materials, choosing the components of their new device from among a number of available and non-toxic materials, and Gustav Nyström, director of the Cellulosic and Wood Materials Laboratory, and lead author of the research, says: “We were very confident that we would eventually reach After conducting experiments on hundreds of possible scenarios for the components of the device, the scientists settled on using a type of graphite ink for the cathode, a type of zinc ink for the anode, and a paper saturated with salt to perform the electrolyte function. And when the paper is in its dry state, the battery can be stored for long periods, but just by adding a few drops of water, the stored salt dissolves and allows electrons to move, and after the paper gets wet, the battery takes about 20 seconds to start working, producing a constant current of 1.2 volts, lasted until the paper was completely dry (for comparison, a conventional AA battery produces an electrical current of 1.5 volts), and when the researchers rehydrated the paper with water, the battery produced He then applied an electric current of 0.5 volts for another period of more than an hour.
Although the researchers have demonstrated that the battery they created can power an alarm clock, they do not expect these paper batteries to replace the traditional AA batteries currently in circulation, but Nystrom sees the potential for these batteries in the future for diagnostic tests and environmental sensors, and he hopes At the same time, this should go hand in hand with the use of other sustainable components in electronic devices, such as screens and enclosures, and so on, the future we are looking forward to may not be far away.
It’s hard to predict a time frame for mass-manufacturing such devices, but Nystrom says he’s communicating with potential industry partners and believes such batteries could be available in two to five years. The performance that this battery has achieved so far is already sufficient to power many of these devices”, so it depends, in the first place, on expanding production and integrating these batteries into systems such as diagnostics and environmental sensors.
Nystrom says his team created the battery without compromising sustainability standards. “The starting point for this project was the desire to make use of sustainable materials,” he says, and that “it was this beginning that led us to this useful innovation.”