Experiment Fruitbattery

Question: How will different fruits affect the amount of energy discharged?

Rationale: If our group finds a good fruit that produces lots of electricity, we can make a more ecofriendly
battery because metal batteries are metal that just gets wasted after use, making lots of landfill but a fruit
battery will be compostable. In in the future GMOs might make it even more power and even more life
time. Also, they might even be able to use your rotten fruit.

Also, Stores don’t usually sell fruit that looks bad. If we manage to find a fruit that produces lots of
electricity, we could use the fruit that is wasted to create batteries instead of leaving it there to waste.

Sites we used for research:

https://www.thoughtco.com/how-to-make-a-fruit-battery-605970

https://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/fruit-power-battery/

https://explorable.com/fruit-battery-experiment

Our Hypothesis: Our hypothesis is that the fruit with the most citric acid will produce the highest energy
output. We think this because the citrus will conduct the energy the best, making the greatest electric
charge.

Research:
So, we will need to squeeze the fruit to let the juices start flowing but not too hard and then puncture the peel
with zinc and copper wire, placing them at about 2 inches apart. We will need citrus fruits.citrus fruit conduct the
most electricity. The nails cannot be touching.

Citrus fruits have a high acidic content and if you have a lot of acidic content, it will be better for conducting
electricity.

You don’t really need zinc and copper but they work well together.

You need dissimilar metals. – RN

The copper and zinc metal act as positive and negative battery terminals. The zinc metal reacts with the acidic
lemon juice (mostly from citric acid) to produce zinc ions (Zn2+) and electrons (2 e-). The zinc ions go into
solution in the lemon juice while the electrons remain on the metal and eventually make it to the copper
making the battery terminals and electrons are producing the charge. Batteries are comprised of two different
metals suspended in an acidic solution and the fruits juice is the acidic solution and the zinc and copper is
acting as the two different metals. -DB

The reason that you need to tenderize the fruit is because the juices inside the fruit, the juices need to be
flowing and moving.

A wet cell includes a negative electrode, a positive electrode, and, an electrolyte which conducts ions. The ions
will flow through the copper and zinc and will produce a small electric charge.
 Alessandro Volta’s voltaic pile was the first “wet cell battery” to make an electric charge. - BH

Materials:

1. Mango
2. Orange
3. Lemon
4. Grapefruit
5. Kiwi
6. Tomato
7. Zinc wire
8. Copper wire
9.

Steps of our experiment:

1t

Our Results:
Looking at our results, it is clear that our original hypothesis was right. One way we know it is right is that
grapefruits are a citric fruit, but lemon has more citrus. We think this happened because the grapefruit
was bigger, so it had a larger citrus total. Another interesting that that happened is that the tomato tied the
lime in energy output. I think this was because the tomato was so much easier to get the juices running
so that it was a lot easier to get the power flowing better. In conclusion, it turns out that grapefruit is the
best fruit confirmed. If I were to do this again, two things I would change would be Use more fruits types,
different time off of the plant, and maybe use 2 metals that are not zinc or copper or all one type of metal.