The Portobello Mushroom Lithium-ion Battery

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have used portobello mushrooms to create a more durable lithium-ion battery anode.

Most of today’s lithium-ion batteries have anodes made of graphite. It’s a relatively expensive material and production of graphite anodes involves preparation using chemicals that aren’t particularly environmentally friendly; creating a large amount of hazardous waste.

Demand for graphite is also increasing – 900,000 tons of natural raw graphite will be required for anodes used in the batteries of nearly six million electric vehicle forecast to be built by the end of this decade.

It’s a lot of graphite, so cheap and more environmentally friendly alternatives are being sought from sources such as biomass.

UC Riverside engineers looked into mushrooms as mushroom tissue is highly porous, which creates more space for the storage and transfer of energy. The potassium salt concentration in mushrooms could also enable increased electrolyte-active material over time; basically increasing a battery’s capacity instead of it decreasing as is the case with today’s lithium-ion batteries.

The research focused on the skin of the caps of portobello mushrooms (A. bisporus), which was subjected to pyrolysis; the thermochemical decomposition of organic material at elevated temperatures in the absence of oxygen.

Portobello mushroom battery anode

Results indicate  mushroom carbon anode technology could, with some tweaking, replace graphite anodes. Processes need to be optimized to expose the microchannels formed during pyrolysis, which would increase the measurable surface area.

“With battery materials like this, future cell phones may see an increase in run time after many uses, rather than a decrease, due to apparent activation of blind pores within the carbon architectures as the cell charges and discharges over time,” said Brennan Campbell, a graduate student in the Materials Science and Engineering program at UC Riverside.

We assume there’s a possibility the technology could be applied to larger applications such as residential battery storage.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

The team involved, led by professors Cengiz Ozkan and Mihri Ozkan from UC Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering, also developed a lithium-ion battery anode based on nanosilicon derived from beach sand last year.

Patents have been filed for both inventions.

Source

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