Scientists have developed a new biodegradable battery that runs on sugar and can work for long hours without charging.
In as soon as three years, the new battery could be running some of the cell phones, tablets, video games, and the myriad other electronic gadgets that require power, researchers said.
The battery developed by a Virginia Tech research team has an unmatched energy density, a development that could replace conventional batteries with ones that are cheaper, refillable, and biodegradable.
While other sugar batteries have been developed, this one has an energy density an order of magnitude higher than others, allowing it to run longer before needing to be refuelled, YH Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Engineering, said.
"Sugar is a perfect energy storage compound in nature. So it's only logical that we try to harness this natural power in an environmentally friendly way to produce a battery," Zhang said.
The development could help keep hundreds of thousands of tonnes of batteries from ending up in landfills, researchers said.
Zhang and his colleagues constructed a non-natural synthetic enzymatic pathway that strip all charge potentials from the sugar to generate electricity in an enzymatic fuel cell.
Then, low-cost biocatalyst enzymes are used as catalyst instead of costly platinum, which is typically used in conventional batteries.
Like all fuel cells, the sugar battery combines fuel --in this case, maltodextrin, a polysaccharide made from partial hydrolysis of starch -- with air to generate electricity and water as the main byproducts.
"We are releasing all electron charges stored in the sugar solution slowly step-by-step by using an enzyme cascade," Zhang said.
Different from hydrogen fuel cells and direct methanol fuel cells, the fuel sugar solution is neither explosive nor flammable and has a higher energy storage density. The enzymes and fuels used to build the device are biodegradable.
The battery is also refillable and sugar can be added to it much like filling a printer cartridge with ink.
The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.