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Design a Battery

Always check with a parent or guardian before you start a project and make sure it is okay to use materials you find around the house.

Most of these materials can be found at your local hardware store or online.

Using common household materials, design and construct your own battery that produces enough power to light up an LED bulb.

Battery Power

Consider all everyday devices that run on battery power: mobile phones, bluetooth speakers, television remotes, wall clocks, cameras, flashlights, computer mice, etc. The invention of the battery has allowed engineers to develop all kinds of technology to help and entertain us. Have you ever thought about how these batteries work?

Homemade Batteries

You can actually make your own batteries using 3 simple ingredients: two different types of metal (for the electrodes) and an electrolyte, a fluid or something that contains a fluid with ions (like salt) in it that can carry electricity. While the most often used metals are copper and zinc, the electrolyte can be practically anything that is moist and slightly acidic or slightly basic.

Orange Battery, 2012. This is just one of several unique batteries created by artist and photographer Caleb Cartland. You can see images of several more batteries on the artist's website.

In this ex­per­i­ment, we’ll show you how to make a bat­tery a clock can run on!

Reagents and equip­ment

• plas­tic cap;
• graphite rod (pen­cil graphite);
• sil­i­cone tub­ing;
• 0.5 g graphite pow­der;
• 0.5 g man­ganese(IV) ox­ide;
• cot­ton ab­sorbent;
• salt so­lu­tion (am­mo­ni­um chlo­ride so­lu­tion, 5 mol/L);
• zinc-plat­ed bolt.

Step-by-step in­struc­tions

In­sert the graphite rod into the plas­tic cap and at­tach the con­struc­tion to the sil­i­cone tub­ing. Add 1 g of a 1:1 mix­ture of graphite pow­der and man­ganese(IV) ox­ide. In­sert the cot­ton ab­sorbent and add 1 mL of am­mo­ni­um chlo­ride so­lu­tion. In­sert the zinc-plat­ed bolt. Your bat­tery is ready!

Process de­scrip­tion

Elec­tro­chem­i­cal cells are de­vices in which the en­er­gy from chem­i­cal re­ac­tions is turned into elec­tri­cal en­er­gy. An or­di­nary bat­tery is an ex­am­ple of a sim­ple elec­tro­chem­i­cal cell. Its pos­i­tive ter­mi­nal con­sists of man­ganese(IV) ox­ide mixed with graphite, its neg­a­tive ter­mi­nal con­sists of metal­lic zinc, and am­mo­ni­um chlo­ride acts as its elec­trolyte (a sub­stance that con­ducts elec­tric­i­ty). When the cir­cuit is closed – for ex­am­ple, when you in­sert the bat­tery into the clock – an ox­i­da­tion-re­duc­tion re­ac­tion be­gins in­side the bat­tery, and elec­tric cur­rent be­gins to flow through the cir­cuit.

The ox­i­da­tion-re­duc­tion re­ac­tion goes as fol­lows:

Zn - 2e = Zn²⁺

2M­nO₂ + 2N­H₄­Cl + 2e = Mn₂O₃ + 2NH₃ + H₂O + 2Cl⁻

Such a bat­tery can pro­duce up to 1.5 volts of steady elec­tric cur­rent.