Sweet, Sweet Energy

As the general computer industry trend is to find cleaner and greener ways to power up hardware parts and make them use as little energy as possible, Sony and a number of other companies are researching the ultimate green battery that runs on sugar and relies on microbes and enzymes to transform the fuel into usable energy.

The operating principle that supports the Sony made sugar battery is very simple, as the anode is made up of a collection of enzymes which digest the fuel, sugar, while the cathode is made up of microbes that absorb oxygen. The two parts of the battery are separated by a membrane. According to the news site News.com, the anode extracts electrons and hydrogen as the by-products of the chemical reactions and then the hydrogen migrates through the membrane to the cathode and combines with the oxygen in order to form water. The loose electrons are collected and they can be used just like in the case of a classical battery.

While this technology is only in the first stages of its development, Sony already has a working prototype that has an energy output of 50 milliwatts, which is quite low, so the manufacturing company had to daisy chain a few of these sugar based batteries in order to power up an ordinary MP3 player. Biologically-inspired processes are becoming more and more important for the entire industry and the research community that is looking for new ways of producing energy from entirely bio degradable materials.

The Sony made sugar based battery is based on a paper that the Japanese company recently presented at the 234th American Chemical Society National Meeting And Exposition in Boston, one of the premier and longest running scientific conferences in the world.