Researchers used Portabella Mushrooms to make Efficient Batteries

This diagram illustrates how mushrooms are turned into a material for battery anodes.

They have created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are affordable, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. The major disadvantage is that graphite is costly and its production takes a long time and harms the environment.

Graphite degrades over time as the result of electrode damage, the high concentration of potassium salt in portabellas improves the material’s electrode capacity.

Apple and Google just previewed new drugs and smart phones boasting current technologicals innovations, but a few things those particular things can’t sing his own praises is basically a battery made out of portabello shallots.

Brennan Campbell from Riverside’s material science program, said, “With battery materials like this, future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease, due to apparent activation of blind pores within the carbon architectures as the cell charges and discharges over time”.

If this technology will be applied after all, I hope that it will get to all batteries, especially vehicle batteries and this way the world would probably be just a bit healthier than it is now.

Batteries consist of three main elements: a negative terminal (cathode), a positive terminal (anode) and a solid or liquid separating them (electrolyte).

The research focused on the skin of the caps of portobello mushrooms (A. bisporus), which was subjected to pyrolysis; the thermochemical decomposition of organic material at elevated temperatures in the absence of oxygen.

Portabello mushrooms are an ideal candidate to replace synthetic graphite for a multitude of reasons, the researchers say.

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.

The Ozkan’s research is supported by the University of California, Riverside.

Now comes word that researchers at Researchers at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering have found yet another use for mushrooms – in batteries.