The waste parts of the world鈥檚 smelliest fruit can be recycled into energy storage devices to rapidly charge electric vehicles and gadgets.
Vincent Gomes at the University of Sydney and his colleagues used leftovers from notoriously smelly durians and jackfruits, the world鈥檚 biggest tree fruit, to make superlight, hollow materials called aerogels. The aerogels make efficient component parts for energy storing devices called supercapacitors.
鈥淒urian and jackfruit offer waste inedible portions that are porous and may replace high cost supercapacitor materials, such as聽carbon nanotubes and graphene,鈥� says Gomes.
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Supercapacitors work differently to conventional batteries and so can鈥檛 store as much energy, but they can charge much faster. They can be used to store the energy harvested from braking systems in electric vehicles, which can then be transferred to the battery or used to provide short bursts of power for quick acceleration.
Biowaste products such as paper pulp, watermelon and sugar cane have been used to make aerogels for supercapacitors. But durian and jackfruit are more unusual materials.
Unusual fruits
The durian fruit is an Asian delicacy that and has soft lobes of fruit inside. Cutting open the shell releases a smell that has been likened to festering roadkill.
Jackfruit looks like a huge, elongated, bumpy plum. The fleshy lobes have a stringy texture that makes jackfruit popular as a vegan substitute for pulled pork.
To make them suitable materials for supercapacitors, Gomes鈥檚 team heated the fruits鈥� spongy, inedible cores with steam and then freeze-dried them. The cores were put in a furnace to make them into highly porous, ultra-light aerogels, and then used to make electrodes.
When the team put both the durian and the jackfruit electrodes into a supercapacitor, the durian-based electrode performed better. Durian electrodes could also store more electric charge than currently used carbon materials.
鈥淛ackfruit and durian obviously behave well and produce good quality carbon for supercapacitor electrodes,鈥� says Brian Derby at the University of Manchester, UK. But he says this use of the fruits may not be 鈥済ame-changing鈥�. 鈥淭here are plenty of other potential source materials to study,鈥� says Derby.
Journal of Energy Storage
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