Can leaves also be used as batteries? Yes, you read that right. Researchers at the University of Maryland in the United States used oak leaves and some sodium to make an environmentally friendly battery that is easy to obtain and low-cost. The researchers first baked oak leaves at 1,000 degrees Celsius for an hour to carbonize the leaves, and then added sodium. The back of the oak leaf is full of pores, which were originally used to absorb water, and the researchers just used these pores to absorb the sodium electrolyte; the front of the leaf has become a layer of nanostructured carbon that can absorb the charged sodium; the whole process just forms The positive and negative poles of a sodium battery.
American researchers discover that leaves can also be used as batteries
In detail, sodium batteries came out almost at the same time as lithium batteries, which are currently the mainstream in the market, and sodium batteries are more efficient. However, since no suitable electrode material has been found, the cycle life of sodium batteries is far inferior to that of lithium batteries. Many scientists are working on solving the material problem of sodium batteries.
The American Daily Science News Network quoted the words of researchers from the University of Maryland as reporting that leaves can be seen everywhere and can be easily picked up. They have previously used other natural materials such as wood fiber to make sodium batteries, but found that the shape and structure of leaves are more suitable. They plan to use different shapes of leaves to make batteries in the next step, hoping to find electrical energy storage that prioritizes thickness, structure and elasticity.
The researchers currently have no plans to put the leaf battery into commercial production. The findings were published in the frontier issue of Applied Materials and Interfaces, published by the American Chemical Society.