Texan team paints batteries onto beer steins Researchers in Texas have discovered a way to break down the components of a battery into liquid form and paint power cells onto everyday objects. Battery beer stein An electrifying brew In a paper published in Scientific Reports, the team at Rice University detailed the development of fluids that mimic the conventional …
They just captured the energy earlier in the (water, barley, hops, yeast) -> beer -> urine pathway, that's all. So it should be more efficient ... of course if they could capture it earlier still - say, plough up all the fields of barley and cover them with solar panels - and we'd be spared the whole tedious process of getting outside the beer and converting it into urine.
standard batteries (of the sort invented by Volta more than a hundred years ago) rely on the transfer of electrons between two different metals through an electrically conductive solution ... if you used two steel plates the voltage you'd experience between them would be zero.
If you used a copper plate and zinc plate you get a bit more than one volt, if you're sticking them in the ground then the ground water will be your electrolyte... if you want to go around contaminating ground water in this manner (the more reactive of the two metals dissolves in the electrolyte during discharge) be my guest just don't come running to me when the Environment Agency come after you.
ok... so you got a potential of 2.4v and sustained it for six hours? The vital missing piece of information here is the *current* of that discharge (if they just wired a volt meter to it we are talking about micro-amps). As in how many amp hours did they store in the battery? I expect the energy density they got was somewhat less than a commercial battery (given the compromises they'd have to make to make it paintable) and the volume is by definition low as it's just a layer of paint.
The key question is how long could you run a smart phone (or other useful device) from a painted battery? and how big an area would you need to paint? If it turns out you need an area the size of parachute to get useful quanties of stored energy it's a whole lot less exciting...
Never mind the techniques apparent sensitivity to such mundane substances as air or water.
Still keep working on it...
Don't come here with that naysayer mumbo-jumbo about current!
To the Great Unwashed this looks like a break through. Just plug your air conditioning into a a beer mug and keep drinking! Plug in your beer fridge too. That will keep you endlessly supplied with beer.
Of course in a few months we will never hear about this again. It will have been suppressed by the Evil Oil Empire - just like Brown's Gas.
Where's the "Bah! " button?
I been playing with solar lately myself. The quick lesson is deep cycle batteries.
Sure the spray paints with conductor segment attachments might not provide 200 AMPS to your Ham Radio with 2KW amp, but it does power that piece of crap Craig MP4 player when there is no power. It can replace the 1.5 x 3ea batteries in that 23 LED lamp assembly. That might just be enough to get your cooking done or your but cleaned proper with toilet paper in the middle of the brown out.
"To manufacture the positive current collector the team used carbon nanotubes in solution, while its negative collector counterpart consists of commercially available copper paint mixed with ethanol."
"While the technique is interesting, don’t expect to buy a can of battery paint any time soon. Some of the materials used are highly toxic and the painting itself needs a special argon-filled chamber for assembly. The team is now working on adapting the paints to be safer to use and adding water and oxygen sealants to get the batteries working outside the laboratory."
thinking about this down the garden shed, i have to mention the obvious here as i don't get it....
why don't these saki rice wine people just use cheaper nano electroplating as used in this paper years ago and probably forgotten now http://ecs.skku.ac.kr/papers/fu1.pdf in combination with printable nano diode junctions circuits and printable solar on plastic or other such transparent cheap to make materials,
they could even go all out and add in some Electro-deposition nano piezoelectric generation and nano thermoelectric layers in there at the same time in production to get the current up, this painting on stuff is fine as an idea but non of this seems realistic in the real world in isolation, only combined so called combined hybrid laminates of different power storage and micro generation make for a potentially real commercial cheap option for everyone here, :)
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