beer can power cell

[hartiberlin]

Hi All,
here is an interesting new battery cell to recycle used beer cans made of Aluminium.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbS64LblwG8

The company is:
http://metalectrique.com/pg003-fr.html

and here is another video:

http://metalectrique.com/images/beercan.avi

I wonder what kind of electrolyte they are using.

I had simular success with K2CO3 added into water as electrolyte.

You need a big conductive graphite surface for the other electrode.

I wonder, why they have the aluminium can as the positive pole ?
When I have done simular experiments, my metal was always negative
and the graphite was always the positive pole... Hmm...??

[TheOne]

but its like a battery, It will die after some time?

[hartiberlin]

Yes, it was said to contain about 60 Watthours of energy.
So not too bad, if the electrolyte is cheap and the graphite
electrodes can be reused and you only need a new beer can
every few days..

[JackTSunn]

Hi,
I made the beercan battery and a variant using a heineken alu bottle ran for 9 hours non-stop at an innovation fair in Paris in June 07; we stopped it because it was time to leave, but when I looked inside there was no obvious damage to the can. I guess it would have run OK for much longer. The motor we use is drawing about 200mA so you can figure out that with a 60Wh theoretical energy inventory this can will run the motor for a long time.

I know everyone is curious about the electrolyte - it is special and we worked on this for several years to get what we have now. We're a commercial company and the elctrolyte recipe is a trade secret, however it will run with salt water should anyone wish to try it, but it needs more attention to extract all of the energy.

We're able to supply products such as our 6-pack version with USB power. It's transparent so you can see what's going on. You could stack them in your garage and produce some serious power from the waste Alu you get from packaging - I collected a lot within one week at my house.

It is reusable so you can load more cans as you need the power.

Hope this is of interest.


Kind Regards

Jack

[hartiberlin]

Hi Jack,
very nice.

How much is the 6 pack unit ?

We don?t want to compromise your trade secret here,
but maybe you can give us some figueres, how much current you
get with saltwater or K2CO3 in water solution ?

If the electrolyte is caustic it works better to decompose the Aluminium,
thus using K2CO3 is much better than just salt NaCl in water.

Another question is, how your graphite electrode is setup ?

Is it just a simple rod or a special cylinder and is it made,so
that it is porous, so you get the air into it , as you claimed it is an
air powered cell ?

Many thanks in advance for answering a few questions.

Regards, Stefan.