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Making a battery

pidja105

Oct 16, 2015
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Hello,
I wish build a battery from saltwater, vinegar or baking soda...Can someone explain me how to build battery strongest you can tell me, voltage 12V, I will not use that for car or similar :).Thanks!
 

(*steve*)

¡sǝpodᴉʇuɐ ǝɥʇ ɹɐǝɥd
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Jan 21, 2010
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Try two dissimilar metals in saltwater or vinegar. This will make a cell. From this construct a battery to give you the voltage you need.
 

duke37

Jan 9, 2011
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You will need several cells to get 12V.
You could look up a book written by my brother-in-law for the voltages available. See Gibson and Sudworth.
Battery research has taken place over many decades and there seems to be no satisfactory solution. The lead/acid battery is most common, any battery with a higher energy density can be a fire risk.
 

jonathanscottjames

Jul 25, 2010
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this will be non-rechargeable:

i would try copper and steel and high strength paper towels. and plastic saran cling wrap and a large size soft drink bottle

because I've never seen anything corrode as fast as a combination of steel and copper.

get a short piece of 1" water pipe and cut it in half length wise with a hacksaw, thnen flatten it inrto a sheet.

then
get a steel can from some canned food.(you can tell if it's steel because it is magnetic). cut the top and bottom off the steel can with a serrated knife then cut the calendar and flatten it into a sheet ,, then scrub it with a steel wire brush(because it's coated with plastic) .

cut out some small small pieces about the same size and shape from the copper and steel. (it does not have to be even close to the same size. maybe they should be strips of metal so you can attache the wires to them later.

you might drill holes in the pieces in one corner of each piece and try to connect wires to them. steel wire on the steel pieces and copper wire on the copper pieces. but you might just try sliding the wires in and hoping for incidental contact

then make some strips of paper towel to individually wrap the metal pieces in just to hold the copper and steel from touching

then wrap the metal pieces in the paper towels ,, try to leave a corner of the metal sticking out from the paper towel wrappings for an electrical connection to each individual metal piece,


then take a plastic 3 liter or 2 liter soft-drink bottle and cut the middle section out and form it into a sheet

make an agronomy tray out of it (fold and crease it ,with pliers, into a open box) that the metal pieces will fit in when stacked together after they are wrapped in paper towel strips but don't put them in yet.
.. tape around the periphery of the tray with a couple or wraps of anchor-tape or any strong sticking tape,, even scotch tape might work for a little while,

then try to connect wires to the metal pieces

then make pairs of copper and steel strips,

then lay a small sheet of plastic film saran wrap in the tray and lay 2 towel wrapped metal strips in one end of the tray , then flip the end of the saran wrap back and lay another piece of saran wrap in the rest of the tray and stack another pair of copper and steel strips in and flip that piece of saran back and do that till the tray is stacked full of metal pieces, then go back and pour in a few drops of your favorite electrolyte,, (water)(or lemon juice) (or salt water)

connect them in series till it equals 12 volts. don't short it and burn yourself. it will corrode fast when its hooked up to a load. but unhooked it may last a few hours after the electrolyte is added. lol. good luck

from home depot. they usually sell 10 foot sections for like 10$ last time i bought one..
 

ChosunOne

Jun 20, 2010
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First problem I see here is that the OP is posting from Serbia. I don't know how available or expensive a lot of this stuff is there. I think Eastern European countries don't have the throw-away culture we have here in North America, so all the soft drink bottles may be glass (deposit for the bottle, for all I know.) Paper towels (throw-away thinking) may not be common there.

Saran wrap is a brand name, not generic and OP may not recognize it. (kind'a off-topic, but "saran" in Serbian (Шаран in Cyrillic) means carp--and I think they wrap their fish in newspaper.;)

Some steel cans, not all, have plastic on the inside of the can. All steel food cans are galvanized steel: They have a thin coating of zinc on the outside at least, sometimes on both sides. It's the zinc coat that gives the vigorous reaction between cans and copper. The steel-copper reaction is much calmer. The steel-zinc reaction is pretty active too--if you cut or scrub galvanized steel, a lot of the electron exchange is going to be between the steel and its zinc coating and less current between can and copper.

And I have no idea whether they market plastic-coated (on the inside) steel cans in Serbia, anyway. Galvanized steel cans have been used far and wide, so the zinc-steel-copper three-way will be a serious consideration in designing the battery. If it can be constructed without cutting through the zinc coating, it can make a good battery until the thin coat exposes steel, which won't take long, and then we're back to the 3-way reaction.

I also have no idea if Home Depot has any outlets in Serbia, nor how available (and expensive) strips of pure copper are: Serbia has lots of copper but its industry declined drastically in the 90's and it may not refine its own copper. Only pure copper is effective as a battery electrode because impurities will cause local reactions in the metal surface, draining electrons away from the cell flow, just like the zinc and steel once the coating is breached.

Here in North America, we have piles of food cans and scrap copper all over--electric wire, for example, is pure, electrolytically refined copper, and it's not hard to find scrap wire. I suspect in Serbia, "scrap" metal of any type is harder--more expensive--to come by.
 

duke37

Jan 9, 2011
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"All steel food cans are galvanized steel"

Surely not, They are called tin cans and are plated with tin. They solder easily!:)
 

ChosunOne

Jun 20, 2010
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Yikes, you're right, duke. Tin, not zinc. Don't know what I was thinking. o_O Principle still applies to battery cells, though. Once the tin-not-zinc coating is breached, you have local action between the tin and steel that crashes the output of the battery. It does work well for a short time, though.
 
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