Kevin Can you imagine using your spit as fuel? A saliva-powered battery could make that a reality, giving you the power you need for some devices.
Forget charging cables and wall outlets – researchers have created a paper-thin battery that springs to life with just one drop of saliva. This isn’t science fiction; it’s real tech that uses bacteria in your spit to generate electricity. While it won’t power your phone anytime soon, it could revolutionize medical testing in remote areas where regular batteries are too expensive or hard to find.
What’s the story behind this battery?
Using microbial fuel cell technology, a Binghamton University research team has created a new battery that can be powered by your spit. Actually, it’s bacteria-powered and made for very small electronics with a very thin battery. This development allows an electrical current to flow through the bacteria from saliva to power the battery, which is paper-thin, thus called a paper-based battery innovation. This new battery is made for rural areas that don’t have constant access to electrical power the same way urban areas do, which could make this little battery and its unusual fuel source very useful in dire situations.
Paper-based, freeze-dried power
The new paper-based battery uses bacteria-powered cells that are extremely thin. The battery cells are inactive, freeze-dried cells that have the ability to send electricity outside their wall, which makes them exoelectrogenic cells. This freeze-dried bacteria power only needs saliva to wake up and generate power within minutes of coming in contact with your spit. This technology is great for point-of-care diagnostic devices in rural areas, such as developing countries without reliable electric grids. These devices typically don’t need more than a few microwatts of power for a few minutes, which means commercial batteries are too expensive and large for such applications.
Could it be a survival tool?
If a saliva-powered battery can be commercially available and developed for larger devices, it could become a survival tool and something that many hikers, backpackers, and overlanders choose for their gear. Imagine being able to power up your device using your spit to at least get a signal out that you’re in danger and in need of rescue. That would be much better than running out of phone battery with no way to recharge your phone and get a signal out to those who could rescue you.
What’s the next step?
Professor Seokheun Choi and his research assistant Maedeh Mohammadifar, have their work cut out for them. The next step in this technology is to improve its power density. This means getting more wattage per square inch, in order to allow these thin batteries to be utilized in real-world applications.
“Now, our power density is about a few microwatts per centimeter square. Although 16 microbial fuel cells connected in a series on a single sheet of paper generated desired values of electrical current and voltage to power a light-emitting diode (LED), further power improvement is required for other electronic applications demanding hundreds of milliwatts of energy.”
– Professor Seokheun Choi
Are these batteries biodegradable?
The new paper-thin bio-batteries are activated with the microbial content of saliva, but are they biodegradable? These batteries provide biodegradable battery technology, which is an important advancement in the battery world. Currently, discarded batteries have to be handled and disposed of properly to be recycled if they can, and a new biodegradable technology is a welcome change to typical battery technology. This could be a lightweight and cost-effective innovation that might redefine portable energy in the next decade.
Are the applications endless?
Although this team from Binghamton University has figured out how to create a saliva-powered battery, which uses your spit for power, that doesn’t mean it will be a widely used item. Don’t expect to power an electric car with spit to recharge the battery, or to use this technology in medium-to-large electronics, but for smaller applications, it could eventually be useful. The initial goal is to power small medical testing devices for developing countries where many diseases are still rampant that can be addressed with vaccines. Those tests could go a long way to helping people in these countries live healthier lives.
A saliva-powered battery has been created, and once the team figures out how to get more power from these batteries, it will be interesting to see how they are used in real-world applications. Pretty soon, you might see people spitting on their phone charging ports to recharge the batteries (not really), which would be a strange sight indeed.
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