American researchers have found that leaves can also be used as batteries

Leaves make batteries? Yeah, you read that right. Using oak leaves and some sodium, researchers at the university of Maryland have created an environmentally friendly battery that is easy to source and cheap to use. The researchers first baked oak leaves at 1,000 degrees Celsius for an hour to carbonize them, then added sodium. The back of the oak leaf is filled with tiny pores, which are used to absorb water. The front of the leaf has been transformed into layers of nanostructured carbon, which absorbs charged sodium; The whole process forms the positive and negative poles of the sodium battery.

In detail, the sodium battery came out at about the same time as the current mainstream lithium battery, which is more efficient, but has not been able to find the right electrode material, so the cycle life of the sodium battery is far less than lithium battery. Many scientists are working on materials for sodium batteries.

The daily science news cited researchers at the university of Maryland as saying leaves are everywhere and can be picked up. They have previously made sodium batteries from other natural materials, such as wood fiber, but found that the shape and structure of the leaves are more suitable. They plan to use different shapes of leaves to make batteries next, hoping to find the best thickness, structure and elasticity of the electrical storage.

The researchers currently have no plans to commercialize leaf batteries. The results appear in the latest issue of the journal applied materials and interfaces, published by the American chemical society.