Durian fruit, it’s your next super-fast battery charger
By Rubina Obaid
The resurgence of placing effective amendments to curtail contamination and agricultural biomass has always remained a highly contested agenda from global point of view. Durian is known as one of the stinkiest Southeast Asian fruits which can be synthesized to create and store energy through its bio-waste that is useful to develop ultra-quick electric chargers. The discovery has been made by Vincent G Gomes an associate professor at University of Sydney and recently the results were published in the Journal of Energy Storage. The research revealed that it is practically possible to implement the process by using guts of the fruit into supercapacitors which would be able to store huge amount of energy that can be used to charge an iPhone or Tesla device.
Gomes attributed his choice of Durian as one of the powerful resource with extraordinary solution for energy storage. The structural precision of durians for natural biomass is an outstanding resource as a template for synthetic carbon based material. Durian Fruit: Waste Energy Source The fleshy part of organic waste is having great mechanical stability, high integrated properties of surface area and interfacial active sites enable electromechanical reactions, ionic diffusion and high charge carrier density. Gomes further added that it is imperative to align alternate energy sources and developing storage devices and supercapacitors with high energy density, due to rapidly depleting fossil fuels.
These double layer electrochemical supercapacitors are ideal energy storage candidates which will be greatly helpful in charging portable medical devices and also for batteries used in transportation. Durian Fruit: Waste Energy Source. These supercapacitors made from durian fruit have got superior ability to maintain cycling capability that means the process of fully charging or draining a battery efficiently. Though acquiring a supercapacitor is still expensive that is why Gomes and company have started exploring inexpensive resource by using bio-waste of durian and jackfruit. Generally, supercapacitors are assembled using two metallic foils coated with an electrode material and are pretty costly too.
While keeping environmental factor in mind Gomes worked on the idea of shifting typical lithium ion batteries to supercapacitors which use static electricity rather than chemical energy. Charging a capacitor is like rubbing a latex balloon against your hair in order to create the sticky static. These capacitors do not contain toxic materials and they are chargeable infinitely and way ahead than conventional batteries in many ways. Research also stressed over converting food waste into value added products to improve overall environment and economy.
These supercapacitors have large metallic plates inside them, as compared to an average capacitor. The metallic plates are coated with porous substance like activated charcoal, which create sufficient space for storing more charges. Supercapacitors are like sponge and contain absorbent power of powdery charcoal that enables supercapacitors to store more energy. Gomes and his team used fleshy part of durian fruit to synthesize a carbon aerogel which worked as silica packet to keep moisture at bay. This approach is going to be a great breakthrough in the field of science and technology as it will be a significant move towards better environment, reducing land waste and pollution.
