Can garden herbs improve your car battery?

The last place you'd expect to find garden herbs is in your car battery. But at least one, Rubia, can make car batteries more energy efficient, studies find. 

|
Joanne Ciccarello/Staff/File
Trey Leavenworth harvests some herbs in Cape Cod, Mass. in this 2011 file photo. Herbs are great for cooking, but studies suggest that Rubia may make car batteries run more efficiently.

However you choose to enjoy herbal products, the last place you'd expect to find them is in your electric car battery.

Thanks to a new discovery though, the Madder plant, also known as Rubia, could prove useful as a natural cathode in batteries.

Madder has long been used as a source of purpurin, an organic dye used since ancient times to color fabrics.

As ScienceBlog reports, scientists at Rice University and the City College of New York have discovered that purpurin also makes a good natural cathode for lithium ion batteries.

Unlike many other future battery technologies, this one isn't aimed at improving charging time, increasing capacity or reducing weight--it's simply tasked with making batteries greener.

While the battery toxicity and rare earth metal arguments from electric car naysayers are often exaggerated, finding a renewable alternative to lithium and cobalt cathodes certainly couldn't hurt.

Green batteries are the need of the hour, yet this topic hasn’t really been addressed properly,” suggests Arava Leela Mohana Reddy, author of the study.

"[Lithium-ion batteries aren't] environmentally friendly. They use cathodes of lithium cobalt oxide, which are very expensive. You have to mine the cobalt metal and manufacture the cathodes in a high-temperature environment. There are a lot of costs."

While current lithium-ion batteries are recycled and reused in huge numbers (and lead-acid batteries are the world's most recycled product), Reddy also explains that extracting the cobalt from batteries, during the recycling process, is quite energy-intensive.

The discovery that purpurin was a suitable alternative came during testing different organic molecules for their ability to interact with lithium ions.

Purpurin turned out to be most suitable. 20 percent carbon is added to increase conductivity, and the cathodes can even be made at room temperature. Better still, some of the purpurin used in future could be harvested from agricultural waste.

In addition to the organic cathodes, the team is working on finding organic materials suitable for anodes, and an electrolyte that doesn't break the molecules down. A working prototype of a completely organic battery could be completed in only a few years.

As with other battery technologies, we await the team's results with interest. It's good to see that, in addition to improving a battery's performance, work is still being done to make them greener, too.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Can garden herbs improve your car battery?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2012/1215/Can-garden-herbs-improve-your-car-battery
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe