Now, vitamin-driven battery for cheaper electronics

Scientists have created a new vitamin-driven battery that is long-lasting and has a high voltage, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment.
The battery is similar to many commercially-available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode - the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device, researchers said.
"We have been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronics applications," said Dwight Seferos from University of Toronto in Canada.
"When you take something made by nature that is already complex, you end up spending less time making new material," said Seferos.

Modern batteries contain three basic parts - a positive terminal, a negative terminal and an electrolyte solution.
A positive terminal is the metal part that touches devices to power them and is connected to a cathode inside the battery casing.

A negative terminal is connected to an anode inside the battery casing.
The electrolyte solution lets ions travel between the cathode and anode electrodes.
When a battery is connected to a phone, camera or other device that requires power, electrons flow from the anode - the negatively charged electrode of the device supplying current - out to the device, then into the cathode and ions migrate through the electrolyte solution to balance the charge, researchers said.

When connected to a charger, this process happens in reverse.
The reaction in the anode creates electrons and the reaction in the cathode absorbs them when discharging.
The net product is electricity. The battery will continue to produce electricity until one or both of the electrodes run out of the substance necessary for the reactions to occur, researchers said.
While bio-derived battery parts have been created previously, this is the first one that uses bio-derived polymers - long-chain molecules - for one of the electrodes, allowing battery energy to be stored in a vitamin-created plastic, instead of costlier, harder to process and more environmentally-harmful metals such as cobalt.

Researchers created the material from vitamin B2 that originates in genetically-modified fungi using a semi-synthetic process to prepare the polymer by linking two flavin units to a long-chain molecule backbone.
This allows for a green battery with high capacity and high voltage. It also paves the way for cheaper consumer electronics, researchers said.
The findings were published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.