Accelerating demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles is sparking a high demand for the batteries that store generated energy and power engines. But the batteries behind these sustainability solutions aren't always sustainable themselves. Batteries use an electrolyte to shuttle ions back and forth between positively and negatively charged terminals. An electrolyte can be a liquid, paste, or gel, and many batteries use flammable or corrosive chemicals for this function. Now, scientists have created a zinc battery with a biodegradable electrolyte from an unexpected source - crab shells.
This new battery, which could store power from large-scale wind and solar sources, uses a gel electrolyte made from a biological material called chitosan. Chitosan is a derivative product of chitin. Chitin has a lot of sources, including the cell walls of fungi, the exoskeletons of crustaceans, and squid pens. The most abundant source of chitosan is the exoskeletons of crustaceans, including crabs, shrimps and lobsters, which can be easily obtained from seafood waste. A biodegradable electrolyte means that about two thirds of the battery could be broken down by microbes - this chitosan electrolyte broke down completely within five months. This leaves behind the metal component, in this case zinc, rather than lead or lithium, which could be recycled.
Journal Reference:
Meiling Wu, Ye Zhang, Lin Xu, Chunpeng Yang, Min Hong, Mingjin Cui, Bryson C. Clifford, Shuaiming He, Shuangshuang Jing, Yan Yao, Liangbing Hu. A sustainable chitosan-zinc electrolyte for high-rate zinc-metal batteries from the magazine Matter, 2022.
By Jaideep Khandekar
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