Monday, May 23, 2011

How Does A Potato Produce Electricity Experiment Engineering Tutorial




We somehow laugh about whatever electrical experiment crazy thing had done.
Imagine even fruits can produce or generate electricity I thought its only
for food but now we can used for other thing that can supply your small appliance.

Materials Needed in Making the expirement

3 potatoes
2 lengths copper uninsulated wire (6 cm long)
2 small galvanized nails (must be galvanized for the zinc) or 2 pieces of zinc (6 cm long)
3 insulated copper or aluminum wires with alligator clips on both ends (30 cm long)
1 LED clock that works with 1 – 2 vdc (volts direct current) with battery removed
1 small light bulb that works using 1 -2 vdc
1 light bulb socket


Make a Battery from Potato
Use of Copper and Zinc electrodes and Sulfuric acid as electrolyte is a proven method for this process.
We repeated this experiment with some other fruits and all resulted almost the same. In all cases the produced voltage is between 1 and 1.5 volts, and in all cases they do not produce enough current to turn on a small light.



How to Make a Potato Battery
Another renowned Italian scientist Allesandro Volta was quick to understand the principle acting behind the above phenomena. He realized that there was something inside the frog’s flesh which reacted with electricity to produce the twitching effect.



How does a potato generate electricity?

Positive electrical charges and negative electrical charges attract each other. The positive charge in the metal will attract negatively charged electrons. The other, different metal, may have a negative charge, having reacted with the chlorine in the salt in the potato.



This Week's Experiment - 212 Potato Clicks

You can detect the electricity by connecting the cell to an electric volt meter, if you have one. If you don't, then you can easily detect the electricity with headphones or an earplug from a radio, CD player, etc. Don't worry, we won't hurt the headphones. If you look at the plug from the headphones, you will see that the metal part is made of two or three sections. Put on the headphones.

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