Volcano Battery: Baking soda and vinegar flow battery open source patent

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*With standard vinegar and dilute potassium bicarbonate I get .16 volts per cell with vinegar bieng the + charge.  With hydrogen peroxide and vinegar I get 0.36 volts per cell with hydrogen peroxide bieng the + charge. With sodium hydroxide and vinegar I get 0.5 volts.  With sodium hydroxide and dilute hcl I get 0.36 volts.  Membrane is paper so that may effect things and artifically lower hcl figures since it dissolves paper. Dilute phosphoric acid and sodium hydroxide 0.48 volts.  In these acid/sodium hydroxide experiments adding hydrogen peroxide to either side lowered the voltage.  Still need to try formic acid and hydroiodic acid.  My steel probes are corroding so some of this voltage may be iron/iron oxide!  Needs more testing.  Yes it was contamination with good probes vinegar sodium hydroxide was .18 and phosphoric acid sodium hydroxide was ~0.*

This technology can be used by itself or in combination with anode/cathode metals and/or in combination with sparged gasses.  Using all the above would make this a flow battery/regular battery/fuel cell hybrid/tribrid.Well after a log time stumbling around trying to find a cheap easy and unique battery I made my way to flow batteres.  No electrodes to worry about which is very nice and no exotic gasses needed like the nitrous, oxygen, hydrogen (at very least air) to worry about.  In a flow battery all you have to worry about is pumping liquids which is easier that sparging with gasses.  So I realized instead of these exotic liquids they are trying to use in flow batteries like ionic lithium, why not just use some cheap and easy oxidizers and reducing agents?  Then I realized something I had known for a long time, our bodies are actually flow batteries!  Before I thought our bodies were flow batteries that used iron in heme as the oxidizing agent but now after trying out another "exotic material" called baking soda, I realized the iron is not needed.  How the body works and the premise of the volcano battery is the body works by oxidizing hydrogen ions (that were produced as an end-product of metabolism) with bicarbonate ion (which is produced in the red blood cell.  When these two neutralize eachother they release energy which is captured in the iron atom in heme I believe.  Since we will have metal current collectors in our volcano battery we won't need this iron to capture our released electrons; we will be able to use them directly.  It would be a good idea to charge up capacitors though probably.

The body uses single hydrogen ions and single bicarbonate ions because it is a boss.  This means there is no counter ions like sodium and acetate to worry about gumming up the works.  But in our case we are not going to have hydrogen ion transporters like the body does so we need to compromise.  We can use a reducing acid like acetic acid (vinegar), formic acid (from ants), or oxalic acid (end product of metabolism).  For our oxidizer we can use baking soda or potassium bicarbonate or any type of peroxide like hydrogen peroxide.  Since the body uses bicarbonate (mabye in conjunction with some oxidizing metal ions) I think bicarbonate would be a great bet.  Also since vinegar is really cheap I think that would be a good bet too (but if you like farming ants you know what is even better than vinegar...;).

Also you can add a fuel cell to this setup by just sparging the bicarbonate side with oxygen/nitrous and the acid side with hydrogen.  Doing this will add about 0.7 volts per cell.

Now the hardest part of all this is the mechanical design as well as the membrane.  The membrane should be permeable enough to allow good ion flow between the bicarbonate and acid but not enough flow to allow super fast mixing.  Ultimatly both sides will ecome sodium acetate or sodium formate or whatever and the battery will pee that out and need to be refilled.  You can't charge this the traditional way.

This is 100% renewable and harmless.  You can make the bicarbonate solution by electrolyzing salt water and then pressurizing co2 into it.  You canmake vinegar  from fermenting sugar or ethanol or by reacting carbon monoxide with methanol.  Or you can distill ants to get the even better formic acid ;).

I'm not sure if the surface area of the metallic current collectors matter but may as well try a silver, nickel or copper mesh.  Possibly more noble metals will help improve voltage even more, it is worth a shot. If they do then you will want to select rhenium or iridium as those are #2 and #1 in my tests before.

This technology can be used by itself or in combination with anode/cathode metals and/or in combination with sparged gasses.  Using all the above would make this a flow battery/regular battery/fuel cell hybrid/tribrid.