The simplest homemade battery

How to charge your phone using salt water?

How can you as­sem­ble a sim­ple bat­tery at home? Check out the an­swer in this cool new video!

Safe­ty pre­cau­tions

Per­form this ex­per­i­ment only un­der adult su­per­vi­sion.

Equip­ment

  • cop­per and zinc plates;
  • wires with clamps;
  • phone charg­ing wire;
  • phone;
  • mul­ti­me­ter;
  • LED;
  • plas­tic cups;
  • 100g sodi­um chlo­ride;
  • 1L hot wa­ter.

Step-by-step in­struc­tions

Use croc­o­dile clip wires to con­nect some cop­per and zinc plates. Pre­pare a ta­ble salt so­lu­tion: dis­solve 100g of salt in 1L of hot wa­ter. Pour the so­lu­tion into cups and low­er the “wired” plates into them. It is im­por­tant that each cup con­tains both a zinc plate and a cop­per plate. When the cir­cuit is closed, an elec­tric cur­rent will run through it. You can ver­i­fy this by con­nect­ing a mul­ti­me­ter to the cir­cuit to fig­ure out the volt­age of the cur­rent in it. Try to pow­er a diode – it glows! You can try to charge your phone with it by con­nect­ing your charg­er wire – it will charge, but not for long. Now you know how to gen­er­ate elec­tric cur­rent dur­ing the apoc­a­lypse!

Process de­scrip­tion

Chem­i­cal cur­rent sources are de­vices that con­vert chem­i­cal en­er­gy into elec­tri­cal en­er­gy. The ba­sis of chem­i­cal cur­rent sources is com­posed of two elec­trodes, a pos­i­tive­ly-charged an­ode, and a neg­a­tive­ly-charged cath­ode, lo­cat­ed in a so­lu­tion that con­ducts elec­tric cur­rent. In our bat­tery, the zinc plates act as an­odes, and the cop­per plates act as cath­odes. When the cir­cuit is closed, zinc is ox­i­dized at the an­ode and free elec­trons are formed, which flow through the wires to the cath­ode, and are in­volved in the process of hy­dro­gen re­duc­tion. These two re­dox re­ac­tions gen­er­ate elec­tric cur­rent:

Zn - 2e = Zn²⁺

2H⁺ + 2e = Н₂

Try it