Mushrooms Help Establish Environmentally Friendly Batteries

In addition, because of the high potassium salt concentration, the battery was found to be much more durable and much less prone to deterioration. Mushroom-based batteries may even answer the problem of energy storage degradation for frequently recharged electronics like cell phones.

In an effort to find more sustainable alternatives for battery materials, researchers from the University of California, Riverside have created a battery incorporating the skins of portabella mushrooms. Ozkan’s crew is actually involved with the introduction of packet paradigm battery requirements based upon nanosilicon anodes.

While the newly developed portabella mushrooms lithium-ion battery anode are capable of offering affordable, environmentally friendly product which is very easy to produce.

Synthetic graphite, on the other hand, has a relatively high manufacturing cost due to specific preparation and purification processes that can also be harmful to the environment, according to the research team.

UC Riverside engineers were drawn to using mushrooms as a form of biomass because past research has established they are highly porous, meaning they have a lot of small spaces for liquid or air to pass through.

Battery anodes must provide structure, but also feature porosity – enabling energy to be both transferred and stored more easily. Now, all we need are a few batteries made out of olives and green peppers and we’ll have one truly powerful pizza combination. If more pores are activated, its capacity will also increase allowing a bigger electrolyte activity over time.

Mushroom lithium ion batteries aren’t going to replace traditional batteries anytime soon, as the researchers say the technology needs more optimization before such biological anodes can replace the standard synthetic graphite ones.

It is expected that almost 900,000 tons of natural raw graphite would be needed for anode fabrication for almost six million electric vehicle forecast to be built by 2020.

“With battery materials like this, future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease”, said UC-Riverside graduate student Brennan Campbell.

The UCR Office of Technology Commercialization has filed patents for the inventions above.