How many volts can you get from a lemon

Wash the plates in a mild detergent. Hold carefully to stop them from getting dirty. The edges are sharp! Be very careful when touching the plates to avoid injury. Roll the lemon on a table with your palm. This releases the juice inside the lemon! Next, cut it in half. Use your knife to cut two slits in each half on the flesh side. They should be 5 mm apart and deep enough to fit most of the metal plate inside. Fresh lemons are more juicy than old ones, and see if you can find some with thin skin.

In each half of the lemon, push one zinc plate and one copper plate into the slits you cut. Push them in as far as you can without breaking the skin on the other side. Do it at an angle, so just the top corner is sticking out. We want to cover the metal with as much juice as we can, because it will increase the amount of electrical current our lemon can make. These metal plates can be dangerously sharp. Please be careful.

First, clip a black wire onto the zinc plate on one half of the lemon, and second red wire onto the copper plate on the other lemon. Next, take a third wire and connect it to the remaining copper and zinc plates on each lemon.

You can see in the picture that we used a yellow wire to join the batteries. You can use any color wire. This is an electronic circuit. The LED glows dimly with this configuration. The quality of the copper and zinc can be a problem for a battery like this. Pennies in particular are rarely pure copper. Try substituting a length of 14 gauge copper wire common house wire for the penny. Experiment with different lengths and configurations of electrodes. Other sources of zinc and copper may be found in the plumbing supply department of a hardware store.

Here is a design for a battery constructed from a film container. Use our film cannister battery to power a calculator. The first battery was created in by Alessandro Volta. Today batteries provide the power for an amazing variety of devices, everything from flashlights to robots, computers, satellites and cars.

Inventors and researchers continue to improve the battery, designing batteries that last longer and that are more friendly to our environment. Understanding how batteries actually work requires a knowledge of chemistry. We've had some students do this project and then try to use the lemon "battery" to light a small flashlight's light bulb.

The lemons did not work. The reason is that the lemons produce only a very small current about one milliamp. This is not enough electric current to light the bulb. Even with multiple lemons, the amount of current flowing through the wire is not enough. As the baking soda falls into the bottle, it will mix with the lemon juice and produce carbon dioxide, which will magically blow up the balloon. A main chemical component in lemon juice is citric acid, which is a weak, tricarboxylic acid.

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