Potato Cell Batteries

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Furcurequs
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Potato Cell Batteries

Post by Furcurequs »

In another thread we went off topic and discussed potato batteries a bit. So, I thought I would give us potato heads a thread of our own.

Anyway, I finally did a little experiment myself.

Last time I went grocery shopping, the potatoes were on sale at 5 pounds for a dollar (or 99 cents? I'll just call it a dollar, though), so I bought 10 pounds. I sliced some of them up and tossed them into my crock pot with some chicken this past week, but I also tossed in one small whole potato at the same time.

So, I have since used this one boiled potato to make a potato cell. I pushed a single copper (clad) penny into it, leaving a bit sticking out, and I also pushed in a galvanized nail, with its head sticking out, about a half inch away from the penny. I clipped some test leads to this and had my potato cell!

I assume the nail was zinc plated, but I'm not absolutely sure.

Using some surplus analog current and voltage meters that I had gotten off of ebay, I was able to determine that my potato cell was putting out about 160 micro Watts of electricity. The load was the ammeter itself which showed a current of about 2 mA, and when I connected the voltmeter, it showed about 80 mV without the current dropping too much.

So, that's not a whole lot of power. It's about an order of magnitude lower than one might want to use for a single LED indicator light.

Unless I could find sheets of copper and zinc to make better electrodes, it looks like I would need close to 10 pennies and 10 nails just to power a single indicator LED with decent brightness. That, of course, would also involve dividing up the potato, if one was even enough.

In reading up on this stuff, I've found that the power of a potato battery actually comes from the zinc itself, which is eaten away off of the (negative) zinc electrode.

So, when the potato cell is depleted, new galvanized nails would be required to make another. ...along with, I would assume, a new potato or potatoes.

Dwayne
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agor95
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re: Potato Cell Batteries

Post by agor95 »

Thank you for creating and sharing you fundamental research.

Is there a more volatile metal that is in the same column of the periodic table?

Could magnesium be using instead of zinc?

Could you use potato juice [ vodka - mistype], instead?

Regards
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