Organic Power | Green Energy News

December 18, 2005 – Vol.10 No.39

ORGANIC POWER.

Generating electricity is great fun. Anyone can do it. Easily. How does the grade school experiment go? A penny and galvanized nail stuck in a potato will power a small light, nowadays a very small LED (light emitting diode).

At first glance it seems like the potato is the source of power, right? Sadly it isn’t. It’s just the zinc on the galvanized nail oxidizing in the presence of the copper penny (the cathode) and the electrolyte juice of the potato. An alkaline flashlight battery works pretty much the same way. The potato battery will run a long time until the coating on the nail is fully corroded (oxidized) away, the potato dries out, or is perhaps eaten.

The nail is the sacrificial anode in the electrochemical reaction.

MagCap Engineering of Canton, Mass, in collaboration with inventor Gordon W. Wadle of Thompson, Illinois have applied for a patent for a technology that will draw power from non-animal organisms such as a tree. According to the company, the technology is as simple as driving an aluminum roofing nail through the bark of a tree into the wood and driving a copper stake into the ground nearby. Connect the two by wire, they say, and electric current will be present.

But, have they reinvented the potato battery? Is the electrolyte the water in the ground that runs up into the wood of the tree? Is the sacrificial anode the aluminum nail, the cathode the copper stake? It seems likely. They have, however made the tree battery more sophisticated by conditioning the power output a bit and making the electric current usable.

Even if it’s just a potato battery, organic batteries - batteries without metals - are possible.

NEC Corporation has developed an organic radical battery (ORB) that is thin, flexible and can be recharged in 30 seconds. It’s made of differing kinds of polymers (plastics) with a gel electrolyte in between. The organic (polymer) radical is made stable by the unique molecular structure developed by NEC.

(An organic radical might be simply defined as a highly chemically reactive carbon/hydrogen molecule with at least one free or unpaired electron that’s looking for a partner. Loitering in the structure of a battery that radical would be waiting for a partner to pass by. If that partner electron is spotted in another molecule he/she can be diverted briefly to run an electric motor or light a bulb, then be allowed back, through circuitry, to mate with the radical dude or dudette.)

For now NEC’s battery is being considered for use in smartcards and intelligent paper. Nothing said about powering cars. Still the first use for lithium-based batteries was in small devices like hearing aids, now they’re being considered for hybrid cars.

Visit MagCap at http://www.magcap.com/ , and NEC at http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/ (Press Release Archive, December 2005)