Why potato battery works

But it may be more complicated than that. Olivier Dubois, senior natural resources officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO , says that using food for energy — like sugar cane for biofuels — must avoid depleting food stocks and competing with farmers.

Then, are we not competing with farmers making income from selling potatoes? Pithy answer. Yet in Sri Lanka, for instance, the locally available potatoes are rare and expensive.

So a team of scientists at the University of Kelaniya recently decided to try the experiment with something more widely available, and free — plantain piths stems. Physicist KD Jayasuriya and his team found that the boiling technique produced a similar efficiency increase for plantains — and the best battery performance was obtained by chopping the plantain pith after boiling.

With the boiled piths, they found they could power a single LED for more than hours, provided it is prevented from drying out. Despite all this, some are sceptical of the feasibility of potato power. Still, zinc is quite cheap in most developing countries. And Jayasuriya argues that it could still be more cost effective than a kerosene lamp. When that didn't work we found an LED light bulb instead of the regular, incandescent one we initially were using.

Finally, the light turned on with four potatoes and an efficient LED bulb, which is why we added the option to attach more potatoes to the instructions and why our materials say to use an LED bulb, even though our picture includes the incandescent. Other ideas: We played around with a few ideas before deciding to make a potato-powered light bulb and explaining how and why it worked. We thought about making a small wind turbine or water turbine to produce electricity, and talk specifically about benchmark M or I but decided against it mainly because Spencer had some prior knowledge on how to make the potato battery work.

Additionally, we wanted to try to use the potato to charge our phones but found that it would take far too many potatoes than we could afford. In the end, we were all happy with explaining energy in relation to benchmark C and D through the example of a potato battery.

Reply 6 weeks ago. No, because the potato does not give off as much energy as a charger therefore the potato cannot charge a phone.

Question 6 weeks ago. Hi, i'm doing this project for science fair. I was wandering if you could tell me about the electricity behind the project. If you have any other background information you could share about the electricity or the science inside the potato. Thank you! I want to do the same " make a battery. Hope to show mine in the future. Bright sparks, we all are.

Tip 10 months ago on Introduction. Economically speaking, food-based energy systems can only be viable as long as they don't eat into the needed food supply and that such enterprises don't compete with farmers who grow them for market. The technology is also having a difficult time establishing a niche among more fashionable forms of alternative energy like solar and wind power, where infrastructure and investment seems to be headed mostly.

Thus far, no commercial investors or non-profit organization has stepped up to help expand or distribute any of the prototypes Rabinowitch has developed. Tuan C. Nguyen is a Silicon Valley-based journalist specializing in technology, health, design and innovation. His work has appeared in ABCNews. A potato clock is powered by acid within the spud reacting with a positive and a negative electrode. When the reaction occurs, electrons flow between the materials, generating an electric current.

The negative electrode, or anode, in a potato battery is often made from zinc in the form of a galvanized nail. The positive electrode, or cathode, is often made of copper, which could be in the form of a penny. A potato battery to power a clock requires only a potato, two pennies, two galvanized nails and three insulated copper wires.