Device capable of supplying electricity up to a century after its manufacture

2023-04-21 11:15:07

Scientists have invented a fuel cell that, in theory, should have a useful life of about a hundred years. A key component of the device, and what makes it even more amazing, is a colony of bacteria.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi’s team, from Binghamton University in the state of New York, United States, has been working in recent years on the technological applications of certain spore-forming bacteria.

The most recent of the applications that these scientists have investigated is a fuel cell that can be stored for a relatively long period without degradation of biocatalytic activity and that can also be activated rapidly by absorbing moisture from the air.

There is still a lot of work to do to make the concept a practical reality, but Choi and Maryam Rezaie have already made a test prototype, the size of a coin, with which they have carried out experiments.

The fuel cell is “canned” by wrapping it with a special tape that isolates it from the environment. When the tape is removed, ambient moisture is allowed to come into contact with the cell, and a germinant chemical is added that encourages the microbes to produce spores. The energy from that reaction produces enough electricity in experiments to power an LED, a digital thermometer or a small clock.

Examples where it is seen supplying electricity to the microbe-based fuel cell prototype. (Photos: Seokheun “Sean” Choi. CC BY-NC-ND)

This research is funded by the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research, and it’s easy to imagine the military applications of such a fuel cell, capable of going live on the battlefield no matter how remote or how long it takes. carry stored In any case, it is obvious that such a fuel cell would find multiple uses outside the military field, for example as an emergency energy reserve that does not depend on the permanence of the charge or the expiration date of electric batteries and that does not see limited its energy use to just emitting light as is the case of candles.

Although the idea that microorganisms can generate electricity was introduced in 1911, this question began to be actively investigated in the first decade of the 21st century. Since then, groups of researchers from all over the world have been working on the development of devices that generate electricity using microbes.

Choi and Rezaie discuss the technical details of their new fuel cell in the academic journal Small, under the title “Moisture-Enabled Germination of Heat-Activated Bacillus Endospores for Rapid and Practical Bioelectricity Generation: Toward Portable, Storable Bacteria-Powered Biobatteries.” (Fountain: NCYT de Amazings)