How to make a battery at home from improvised means

Perhaps for some it will be a discovery, as significant as the discovery of America by Columbus, that there is electricity everywhere around us. It literally pierces our entire life. But even knowing this sometimes does not prevent our eyes from rounding up when we learn that stress can be obtained from the most ordinary things and even from food. Using what is available in the kitchen or garage, it is quite possible to build a simple battery at home.

Lemon battery

Even from this fruit, you can get electricity. To do this, you need to prepare the following things:

• one lemon;
• a piece of something steel;
• something made of copper;
• and two pieces of wire for insulation.

First, we will need to clean up our steel and copper items. Ordinary sandpaper will help with this.

Reference. The most common nails can be a steel object. There are plenty of them in any garage. And for "something made of copper", you can use coins in denominations of ten and fifty cents.

Now we stick a nail and a coin into the lemon. You need to make a gap of about three centimeters between them. These will be our electrodes, it remains to connect the wires to them. You can just stick it right next to it. The coin is our positive contact, and the nail, therefore, is negative.

Reference. The lemon is successfully replaced with an ordinary apple. The main thing is to choose the most sour, which is not a pity to start up experiments. And the acid is useful for the reaction.

A lemon or apple battery (if you take only one fruit) will give out about 0.5 or 0.7 volts. This is very small - even the simplest mobile phone cannot be charged. It is necessary to somehow bring the voltage to three or even five volts. But how? It's very simple - to connect more fruits into a single chain.

Reference. To increase the charge of our circuit, it can also be charged. It is enough to include a krone battery or even a mobile phone charger in the circuit.

Getting lemons or apples to generate electricity becomes possible because the copper element interacts with the steel element. The acid inside the fruit triggers this reaction. As long as there is at least a drop of acid inside or as long as the contacts are intact, the battery will continue to work.

Electricity in the bank

Even from an ordinary can, you can build something similar to the very first battery in the world. To do this, you will need:

• a simple glass jar (you can use a glass);
• zinc or aluminum plate;
• a strip of copper;
• several wires;
• ammonia, also known as ammonium chloride;
• tap water.

Our battery will have an aluminum plate as the anode, and a copper plate will play the role of the cathode. Their size must be chosen so that in their area they are equal to the palm of a person. This will make our battery more efficient. We solder wires to the plates. Now our task is to install the plates in the jar so that they do not come into contact with each other. And in height, these plates should be larger than the jar itself.

It's time for the electrolyte. It is done simply. We mix ammonia with water. For every 0.1 liters of water, add 50 grams of powder. Mix everything thoroughly and pour it into a jar. Sulfuric acid can also be used instead of ammonia. To do this, it will need to be brought to a twenty percent state.

Important! If you make an electrolyte based on sulfuric acid, then when you dilute it, you need to pour the acid into the water, but not vice versa. And then the water can simply boil, and as a result of a violent reaction, everything is sprayed. Also, remember to wear protective equipment when handling acid.

We fill the jar with the resulting solution. If you combine several cans into a single circuit, you get a very good battery, the energy of which is quite enough to charge a sufficiently powerful device. This battery is similar to saline batteries.

DIY coin battery

Even the coins in your wallet or piggy bank can generate electricity. From coins, you can build the simplest galvanic cell, which in science is called the Voltaic pillar. We need to prepare:

• several coins of copper (these are coins of fifty and ten kopecks);
• food foil;
• several sheets of paper;
• table vinegar or a steep solution of water and salt.

To make our building look aesthetically pleasing, it would be better to use coins of the same denomination. Before conducting the experiment, you need to rinse all the coins in vinegar. He will wash away all the dirt from them. Now we take scissors and cut rounds from paper and foil, in shape the same as coins. The number of these blanks should be two pieces less than coins.

Now let's assemble our energy pillar:

1. We take a paper round timber, soak it in vinegar and attach it to a coin.
2. Place the foil on the paper.
3. Now again the coin.
4. Until we finish folding the coins, we repeat everything in sequence.
5. As a result, there will be a coin at one end of the structure. This is the positive pole, and there will be foil on the other end. This is the negative pole.

The more coins you collect, the more tension you get. You will not be able to reuse coins. After the experiment, they will be already rusty.

Electricity in a beer can

After drinking canned beer, do not rush to throw away the empty can. It will make a good battery. To do this, you will need:

• beer can (they are made of food grade aluminum);
• coal for a fire or coal dust;
• paraffin candle;
• lead from a graphite pencil;
• water and salt;
• a piece of foam - the foam should be more than a centimeter in thickness.

Cut off the top of the can. Cut a circle out of the foam so that it matches the jar in diameter. We make a hole in the foam, but not through. We will install a graphite rod into the hole. We put foam on the bottom of the can and insert the rod. The graphite rod should be exactly centered on the can. We cover everything with coal dust around the rod.

Important! Make sure that the rod does not touch the walls of the can.

Now we make a solution of salt and water. To do this, we collect half a liter of water and pour three tablespoons of salt into it. Mix everything well so that all the salt is completely dissolved. It will dissolve faster and better if the water is heated. We pour our electrolyte into a jar and seal everything with paraffin. In this case, the graphite rod should rise above the level of the can.

We connect one wire to the rod - this is a positive contact. And the second wire to the wall of the can is a negative contact. If you make a circuit of two cans, you can get a voltage of three volts. Such a battery can power a light bulb.

Potato battery

If you have potatoes at home, then this is quite an energetic thing. True, one-time use. The potato battery can only be used once. For example, on a hike.

To obtain a battery, we will prepare the following elements:

• you will need a large potato;
• insulated copper wires;
• Toothpaste;
• wood chips or toothpicks;
• table salt.

We cut the potato into two parts. It is advisable to do this lengthwise in order to obtain a large cutting area. In one half, cut out the core to get a hole. We put a mixture of toothpaste and salt into this hole. The composition should fill the entire recess. This mixture will be the electrolyte.

In another piece of potatoes, make two holes. The distance between the holes should be such that both are located above the electrolyte mixture when both halves are connected. These holes are for wires. The ends of the wires must be freed from insulation for a length of two centimeters. Now we connect both parts of the potatoes and, so that they do not fall apart, we fix them with toothpicks.

We are waiting for five minutes for the reaction to start. Now we close the wires and see a spark at the end. This is how you can safely light a fire with a potato battery at a halt on a hike.

Conclusion

Naturally, all the considered battery options, although they work, can not fully replace either the battery or the accumulator. But who is stopping us from doing such experiments in order to better understand the structure of these physical elements and chemical processes?