Bio-battery runs 10x longer than Li-Ion

In a breakthrough to develop long-lasting batteries for smartphones and other gadgets, scientists have successfully created a sugar bio-battery that completely converts the chemical energy in sugar substrates into electricity. Our cells use natural catabolic pathways to oxidate the glucose from sugar. Based on that, the scientists used two redox enzymes that generated reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) from sugar metabolites.

"We are the first to demonstrate the complex oxidation of the bio battery's sugar, so we achieve a near-theoretical energy conversion yield that no one else has reported," said Y H Percival Zhang, chief science officer of Cell-Free Bio Innovations (CFB) at Virginia Tech.

"A sugar bio-battery with such a high-energy density could last at least 10 times longer than existing lithium-ion batteries of the same weight," Zhang added.

Apart from being more powerful and efficient, the biobattery is cheaper to make, is refillable, environmentally friendly, and is nonflammable.

The biobattery is a type of enzymatic fuel cell (EFC) - an electrobiochemical device that converts chemical energy from starch and glycogen into electricity. The enzymes allow for the use of more complex fuels such as glucose, which give EFCs great energy density

Read more -here-