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CTOnews.com, April 17 (Xinhua)-- A research team from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) has successfully created a fully edible rechargeable battery made of common materials in our diet. This innovative technology is expected to play a role in health diagnosis, food quality monitoring and edible soft robots. The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

According to CTOnews.com, edible electronics is a new field emerging in recent years, which can have a significant impact on the diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal diseases, as well as food quality monitoring. One of the most interesting and challenging problems in the future edible electronic system is how to achieve edible power.

The team at the Italian Institute of Technology, inspired by biochemical redox reactions in organisms, developed a battery that uses riboflavin (vitamin B2, such as almonds) as an anode and quercetin (a food additive and ingredient, such as mountain mandarin) as a cathode. To increase electrical conductivity, they used edible activated carbon (a common over-the-counter drug), while electrolytes were water-based. To avoid a short circuit, each battery has a diaphragm, and they use Laver as the diaphragm, the kind in sushi. They then wrapped the electrodes in beeswax and drew two food-grade gold contacts (the gold foil used by the West Point chef) from the cellulose-derived scaffold.

The working voltage of this battery unit is 0.65 volts, which is low enough to cause problems when ingested in the human body. It can provide a current of 48 μ A for 12 minutes, or a few microamperes for more than an hour, which is enough to provide power for some small electronic devices, such as low-power LED lamps. This fully edible rechargeable battery is the first in the world and will open the door to new edible electronic applications.

"possible future applications range from edible circuits and sensors that monitor health to sensors that monitor food storage conditions. Moreover, considering the safety of these batteries, they can also be used in children's toys because children play with a high risk of misingestion. In fact, we are already developing devices with larger capacity and smaller sizes. These developments will also be used to power edible soft robots in the future. " Said Mario Caironi, the research coordinator.

"this kind of edible battery is also very valuable to the energy storage community. Making safer batteries without using toxic materials is a challenge we face in the face of a surge in battery demand. Although our edible batteries will not power electric vehicles, they prove that batteries can be made from safer materials than current lithium-ion batteries. We believe they will inspire other scientists to build safer batteries for a truly sustainable future, "added Ivan Ilic, co-author of the study.

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