I'm 69 and grew up in Michigan. I remember Mr. Wizard on tv. He did many types of experiments. What a wonderful time to be young. To me you are the Mr. Wizard of energy. 🤩🤩🤩
Was once installing a production line in a Mexican factory at 2 o’clock in the morning when we needed to check the polarity of a magnet. No tester! I sent my helper to go make coffee while I “thought about the problem”. Of course I had already formulated a plan based on something from Mr. Wizard. I snipped a piece of steel spring wire, straightened and magnetized it. Used whiteout correction paint to mark one end. When the coffee arrived my man was aghast to see me float the wire in it. But as it spun around I asked him which way was my home. (The North end of the wire points to a South pole of a magnet which is somewhere in Canada these days). Mr Wizard saved that company $3 million because the line was installed on time!
I wonder if you could re-purpose Lead/acid car batteries (the shells) to run off this solution instead. The you could build a bank of them for running off-the-grid living. Then you could have a rechargeable power bank that could be easily and cheaply refreshed when needed. I really enjoy the things you come up with. Get's the gears turning!
I always love the battery videos! I wish we could have a battery design contest on this channel with this chemistry. Would anyone else be interested in that?
I love these battery experiments! I just wish it was that simple to store and retrieve a few kilowatts. Would be great to just have a 25L bucket lined with carbon fiber cloth filled with lugols and a huge roll of zinc foil. I guess with enough surface area it would put out more amps and you could just use a 24v to 1.2v step down to charge it.
So clay sewer pipe and charcoal bricketts a 55 gal plastic drum and a wad of old chainlink fence and you have a big cell . You could just drain the electrolyte into another drum to turn off . Placing the 2 drums on either end of a tetter-totter to eliminate the need for a pump. Placing the drums on their sides would shorten the lifting hight and a sliding counterweight on the tetter like on a beam scale takes the work out of lifting the drums with the tetter.
More of this sort of stuff please! Battery chemistry and technology is very interesting and it's the logical next step to generators. Your work is amazing! Cheers!
OMG! Dear Sir, You Do so much for science popularization and mass education! That is why Your videos became an important part of my life! Great Great Thank You, Sir!
I love your content. I have learned so much from your videos and presentations. You are a gift to the common self sufficient person. God bless you for all that you do. I am proud to be a supporter.
Sorry for the dumb question but is it possible to show recharging? Just put power in that simple and the reaction reverses? Would make a great time-lapse
Agreed, maybe he did that on purpose as to nudge us to do it :) Yet, mysteries in general scare me because idk what kinda of gases it could expell, there has to be a catch right?
Yes this is exactly the battery I needed right now! Thank you so much Dr. RMS! (great initials btw)! As your compatriot Bond from across the pond has said, "I hate small portions of anything, particularly if they (are) bad" - but this looks pretty good and scalable as is, although I'll still beef it up with the literature references you mentioned. CHEERS MATE! (I also love your KOH battery from another vid, amazing, tks!)
The more you emphasize how easy something is to "get ahold of," the more likely it is that some bureaucrat will make it her life's work to deprive us of it.
Absolutely love it. Who would have thought about going back to the beginning. LOL. That's where I started a few years ago with me studying the first voltaic pile. Sometimes the first solution is the best solution. Nuclear does the same thing with their rods. Too funny. Just like making your tea. To strong? Take out the tea bag silly. A good source for Zink? Our American penny. Once you take off the copper plate.
would definitely be interesting to see this in a 3D printed enclosure (4 or 10 of them together wired in series for a 4.8V or 12V battery respectively) as well as how it reacts thermally to being charged... as always, today I learned from you Mr Murray-Smith... so you have my heartfelt thanks ;)
now a practical 3D printed design just like your emergency motors would be cool. like using Zach Freedman's Gridfinity 1.0 as a base to stack the cells into. to make a 5V, 12V, 24V, 48V versions all nice and tidy, sealed up, easy to maintain and disconnect etc..
This reaction is VERY aggressive and iodine sublimates extremely easily so you will generate a lot of elemental iodine vapor WITH a flammable liquid. Be extremely careful if you actually do this.
Due to the zinc dissolving into the iodide solution until it's gone, it isn't something that will last long term.. But, it is nice to know that a battery can be made from these materials in a pinch.
Well done Robert - yet again! As a possible design of this battery, i wonder if the zinc negative lift out could become a way of also controlling amperage, as it will be limited to 1.2 volts but the more the stick is immersed the greater the current flow. A neat way to have a battery with an amperage rotary control knob!
Used to use Lugol's solution in the lab to for the stool examination, to differentiate ova and parasites. So now you can have a battery and check to see if you have worms LOL.
cool video. you should link to the original video in the header since it's a little difficult to find. ( 1658 A DIY Battery That Is Crazy Simple To Make ) in case anyone else is looking.
Thank you for this one , really good info .. 10in series =12v and in parallel = 1.2 A .. not bad , i just don't understand why isn't it used more often
Rats! I was looking forward to washing my cat in Lugol's but you kyboshed that idea. lol! Well done Robert, everything old is new again. I've been buying Lugol's in tiny little bottles for a few years for my health and sterilising the rain water at $40 Aust a pop. You info has me thinking I should concoct my own and as a spin off, some home power batteries. Thank you for the idea.
The 'self-discharge prevention' is just the same as the poorly named 'salt-water battery.' A battery which has no electrolyte - you add the salt water only when it's time to use. The energy density and power density are both awful by every measure, but they have one advantage: Unlimited self life. You sometimes find them in emergency locator beacons, because you can still depend on them even if your emergency beacon has been sitting forgotten in the bottom of the life-jacket locker for the last thirty years.
Volta stack style with zinc copper zinc copper and inbeetween each layer charcoal disks soaked in salt water...so 3 disks per cell and stack 50 cells or more you should be able too get usable amps but want too parralel like 30 stacks off 9 maybe and lay cells sideways in a pool off salt water but so only the charcoal disks are sat in the solution so the metals don't connect...should work quiet well and all need too do is top up electrolyte zero charging needed...what you think?
That actually looks like it has potential, with an optimized design, for a home backup. Maybe a few 55 gallon plastic drums, and some homemade clay separators. But I gotta ask... have you tried to DIY a nickel/iron cell? There are quite a few of the old Edison nickel/iron cells that are still usable, 100 years in, having gone through 3 or 4 changes of electrolyte, which is just sodium hydroxide solution.
You'll probably have to top off the water due to evaporation, but I don't think it produces hydrogen or anything like that. 1.2V is right on the borderline of when electrolysis starts to occur, but it usually takes a bit more than that. Raising the pH can reduce electrolysis, but unfortunately, zinc hydroxide is insoluble, and you don't want too many other metal contaminants or you'll just be wasting power. Just look for bubbles I guess.
I see the mechanical "switch" of removing the zinc as an engineering opportunity for the EV market. Any idea on how many recharge cycles this home brewed version can expect?
my guess is it will be down to the break down of the separator and thus the ability to form dendrites between the two plates, shorting it out, the better at resisting that, the longer it will last and the dendrites forming on one side to form more of a foam like surface area, would cause it to discharge faster and release more amperage and thus making the use of it breaking it in so to speak.
You mechanically recharge it by adding more solution to it. You should also probably remove the zinc iodine. You're just basically rebuilding the battery, I believe.
I have a dream I call FREE. Fast Replaceable Electrolyte Exchange. Instead of millions of AA sized lithium batteries to try to uncase and recycle liquids are simple and follow nature's designs. I envision a large tank with lead acid battery design but different chemistry. You could pull into a charging station and quickly drain and refill the electrolyte and off you go. The station can refresh the electrolyte using whatever is best. Wind, solar, generator or plug in. People can have a tank of joy juice charging at home to refuel and run the house. No more exploration, drilling, mining, refining, transporting and storing explosive gas and lithium batteries. Bring able to make your own fuel could be a game changer for isolated developing countries. This seems to be right up your ally. Help me Obi-wan. You definitely earned my subscription.🎉
Nice. There is clay everywhere where I am at, it's easy to find; many deposits you can just pull large glops of clay right up. Now to see how much I can store in something like a 5g/20l bucket - we're pulling two ceiling fans out of the living room that are perfectly functional (replacing with flush dimmable lights) so I can potentially build a completely self contained harvest/storage system that I can throw in the camp trailer and go.
I just realized that since you're already using a fabric for one of the electrodes it can be coated with a couple layers and rolled up - now I can just stuff it in a round bucket with the lid on it and a couple threaded studs to attach wires to the inside/outside of the lid.
I wonder if you could have an equally direct method of suppressing dendrites. Maybe just pull out the zinc and allow surface tension to collapse them down periodically? Have a little wiper that spins around and flattens them down into the electrode? Use some kind of pulsed charge/discharge that favors low surface area deposition?
Hello from Thunder Bay friend, ..brilliant ! why not try an icb? intermediate bulk container, ..might be a globally useful size you know and if you indexed everything you might be able to capitalize on it for all of your future bodkin thingies,....
Необычная батарея, спасибо было очень познавательно. Вы как-то упоминали про твердотельные батареи, скажите, можно ли в домашних условиях сделать твердотельную батарею из доступных материалов?
I worked as a zinc plater for a plating and powder coating company. Seems like your basically plating and stripping the plating over and over as a battery, pretty cool. Im going to make it. Am I correct that the potassium iodine antiseptic available for disinfectant is the same solution?
most/all (disclaimer) batteries rely on the same RDOX processes as plating - selecting electrodes and solutions to store and give up the ions as required. Note that the original single use battery was a carbon-Zinc battery - basically putting the zinc into solution as it discharged - not so different to this open top solution (different electrolyte).
As a improvement to the battery couldn't you add some of your organic graphene to a batch of clay with the temper material and make conductive ceramic terracotta? Couldn't you layer a bit of normal terracotta to the outside to act as your permeable barrier? And mechanically to take the zinc out of solution, just have a manual crank. Though I can see an issue occuring where bits of zinc might break off and keep the cell running at low capacity. And long term, it might be good to discuss how to recycle or dispose the materials used when they are used up.
This is very interesting. So the materials are: - Iodide + Potassium Iodide for electrolyte - Graphite foil for positive electrode - Zinc strip for negative electrode - Terracota pot for separator - A plastic receptacle So how long until each needs changing? And if the electrolitic solution needs changing, what is it done with it? Can it be disposed safely on a compost pile or biodegraded somehow? And where does iodide and potassium iodide come from? If industrial civilization collapsed, how could we manufacture them?
Lugol's iodide has several other uses including microbiological staining of bacteria using "Gram-staining" During which the iodine from the Lugol's solution and crystal violet form a stable complex that will not be released by decolourisation. Thus, Gram-positive bacteria will appear dark blue when viewed microscopically, whereas Gram-negative bacteria can be counterstained with safranin or dilute carbol fuchsin.
I am guessing that the way you said it means that if you put a larger piece of zinc in the solution the milliamps would be improved to higher numbers 200 300 400 etc
Estimate 1-10 possible success of generic cough medicine aluminum + electrode copper - anode ina 5 gallon plastic bucket contains a salt BLOCK ( anode ) plez ty for ur time
This is Really Cool Stuff, thanks for sharing! If the cells are 1.2v each, can they be built into an expired lead-acid battery in order to repurpose the battery?
What if the zinc electrode is a kind of flexible base-electrode where the zinc could stick to it? I don't know if the same carbon fiber can be used for that, giving it the capability to be folded or rolled like paper in order to be removed from the electrolyte
So what if someone had a car that ran off of batteries constructed similarly to your terracotta pot and went to a charge station and instead of plugging in the car, they were to swap battery fluids instead? Could the old fluid then be refreshed/recharged? It could close the gap that gasoline car drivers love to throw out when comparing refueling to recharging.
I think there's a company in India that's prototyping that system. Although I think they swap the whole battery out, and are using smaller lithium iron phosphate batteries or something
So the way I understand it, if the electrolyte fluid is now full of Zinc, you'd have almost no anode left (the Zinc that *was* on the anode is now in the solution). So just adding fresh solution would eat away at any remaining Zinc on that anode, until you're left with nothing.
@@dylan_00 I understand it to be that the zinc is redeposited on the zinc bar when charging. So unless you let the entire bar sacrifice itself to the solution it shouldn't lose much mass.
@@jimlipscomb3236 Right, but when it discharges it is dissolved into the electrolyte solution. So if you keep removing the solution with the zinc, the new solution will keep stripping away zinc, you have to recharge the battery with old solution for the zinc to return to the anode
Thanks Robert, very useful information,but how do you dispose of it ,safely? Genuine question as the longevity of this is obviously limited and the components will need to be replaced.
Could you house it in a 3d printed cell using a non-hydroscopic filament? then use a lifting mechanism to lift the zinc out of the housing to stop self discharge?
Love this battery tech , only read couple of days ago western Australia natural hydrogen found under ground and they've linked it's creation to natural lead and iron underground creating it clearly with water basen under their. Well the news is out Rob i wonder if lead and iron could be useful fuel cell with your extra magnets or for a battery ?. Also Germanium has a second metal for a battery combo i can't recall if a salt not lithium or iron but it releases power dry , Germanium is in the solid state battery...
could not find a source that says the energy density is larger than lithium. In fact practical energy densities I seen is around 100-160 wh/l while lithium is around 220 wh/l . Maybe I'm getting it wrong.
