The durian fruit is widely known to be the smelliest fruit on the entire world, and it has caused people to avoid the smelly thing at all costs literally. It is so bad, smelling that this hated fruit forced an evacuation of a library at a certain university. Now, some brave and possibly odor-resistant scientists have gathered to create and develop a way to use this fruit to create energy for electricity charging, which may sound a little weird.
Scientists have converted the fruit's waste
Researchers at the University of Sydney have now developed a method that can turn fruits, like the smelly durian, into chargers that can be used in devices such as phones, laptops, and tablets. The team has managed to create these supercapacitors in a non-toxic and non-hazardous process.
Associate Professor Vincent Gomes, the lead researcher for this development, said,
"Using a non-toxic and non-hazardous green engineering method that used heating in water and freeze-drying of the fruits' biomass, the durian and jackfruit were transformed into stable carbon aerogels - an extremely light and porous synthetic material used for a range of applications."
Gomes has also said that carbon aerogels can be made into great supercapacitors because of the high porous that is found in them. They tested this for their energy storage properties and what the found goes beyond what they have expected.
These can do great things when it comes to charging
Supercapacitors are basically like reservoirs for energy. They can rapidly store massive amounts of energy using a small battery sized mechanism, and then it will supply some energy to charge any electronic device, which includes phones, tablets, and laptops all within just a few seconds.
When compared to regular batteries, these supercapacitors are not only able to charge various devices, but can also order magnitude that has greater charging cycles than ordinary equipment. The current supercapacitors are made from activated carbon but do not come close to efficiency when compared to the new one in this study.
The reason behind why these scientists specifically chose to use durian is that it was selected based on the excellent nature that the fruit provides for making porous aerogels. Supercapacitors from this fruit can perform so much better than all materials that are currently being used. When compared, it is very cheaper than expensive graphene-based materials. Since it is proven to be a low-cost alternative to store energy, this research would definitely go places.
This research is quite interesting since Australians are not used to this smelly fruit and have general unpopularity for the country and then some. Hopefully, this would pave and give way to the scientists in different countries to come up with their own power bank creation that uses this widely hated durian.
