Portabella Mushroom-Based Bio-Battery Gains Capacity Over Time

Engineers in California have found a new recipe for portabella mushrooms in the design of a bio-battery that actually gains capacity over time rather than loses it, which would be a major shift in the typical degradation of batteries currently on the market.

Researchers at the University of California Riverside have developed a new lithium-ion battery anode that uses portabella mushrooms in place of synthetic graphite, which also is more expensive and less environmentally friendly. Using mushrooms as a biomaterial in the battery eliminates the environmentally damaging purification and preparation processes that the use of graphite in batteries requires, Cengiz Ozkan, a professor in the Bourns College of Engineering and one of the project researchers, told Design News in an interview.

“[We] were drawn to using mushrooms as a form of biomass because past research has established they are highly porous, meaning they have a lot of small spaces for liquid or air to pass through,” he said. “That porosity is important for batteries because it creates more space for the storage and transfer of energy, a critical component to improving battery performance.”

A diagram shows how researchers at the University of California Riverside turned mushrooms into a bio-material for battery anodes that are more environmentally friendly and also can improve the capacity of the battery over time rather than degrade it.
(University of California Riverside)

The high potassium salt concentration in mushrooms also allows for increased electrolyte-active material over time by activating more pores, gradually increasing the battery’s capacity rather than reducing it, Ozkan said.

This means that applications involving mushroom-derived Li-ion batteries—such as personal electronics such as cell phones and tablets—may see an increase in run time after many charge-discharge cycles rather than a decrease, which is due to apparent activation of blind pores within the carbon architectures, Ozkan said.

Researchers outlined their findings in a paper, “Bio-Derived, Binderless, Hierarchically Porous Carbon Anodes for Li-ion Batteries,” published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. Ozkan and Mihri Ozkan, another engineering professor, co-authored the paper with three current or former graduate students, Brennan Campbell, Robert Ionescu and Zachary Favors.

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The battery developed by the team is the first of its kind to take advantage of the porous structure of the mushroom architecture, “directly transforming into a multi-scale highly porous nanocarbon network,” Ozkan told us. Researchers aim to transfer their work to the commercial battery industry as a green and sustainable approach for fabricating battery anodes, he added.

Meanwhile, the team also will continue its work to make improvements to the current battery. Next steps in the research include optimization to further increase the battery’s storage capacity, as well as developing prototypes for specific applications such as personal electronics, he said.

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Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer who has written about technology and culture for more than 15 years. She has lived and worked as a professional journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco and New York City. In her free time she enjoys surfing, traveling, music, yoga and cooking. She currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal.