Electrical energy from foods

Presenting new sources of safe energy sources is not only an urgent need but also a vital input for social and economic development. In this work, we present a novel technology to produce electric energy from food; in particular from commercial potatoes. The food has been sandwiched between two metals; for example, Zn/potatoes/Cu and the open circuit electric potentials Voc have been measured. It has been found that Voc lay in the range Voc 0.32 V < Voc < 1.39 V and decays exponentially by time. The open circuit potential varies from food to another and depends also on the metallic contacts and food thickness. It has been found that Voc is a function of the potatoes thickness, which has a maximum at 1.05 V and the corresponding maximum short circuit current is about 1.7 mA. The internal resistivity for the potatoes battery is about 1.4 × 104 Ω cm and the metallic electrodes resistance is about 57.4 Ω × area for Zn/Cu electrodes. The short circuit current depends on the nature of the metallic electrodes an...