Inspiration
We are shopping for ideas for a science fair project this week for Noelle and decided to go with the classic fruit/veggie battery experiments.
Materials
Any fruits or vegetables that you want to measure, we included potato, sweet potato, onion, pear, apple, orange, grapefruit, lemon, banana, and tomato.
Bow of water
Anything you want to try dissolving in water, we used salt and sugar for out solutions.
Multimeter or a low voltage light bulb if you want to be more qualitative (for positive results measure with the red lead against the copper Anode and
Galvanized nail to act as a Anode (negative end of the battery)
Copper wire (I used a shot copper pipe joint as all of my wires were braided and not great for stabbing) to act as an Cathode (positive end of the battery)
1 AA battery for comparison.
Notes
We went shopping for various fruits and vegetables to test and took turns stabbing various things in to the test subjects. I took a little extra time to sharpen the end of the copper tubing with a dremel to make it go in easier and make sure we have a ice non oxidized surface to make use of. I limited the discussion this time to just voltage and details about battery chemistry, and will bring up amps again in future iterations of of this concept. Noelle took careful notes of our results with the Apple earning the top spot, though just about everything was in the 0.7 to 1.0 volt range with a fair amount of variance with multiple measurements of the same subject. I also made sure to wash off the cathode and anode after each test.
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| The materials for electrolytic stew. |
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| The apple posts the highest result at 1.098V |
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| Sweet Potato posts a respectable 0.918V |
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| Bartlet Pear comes in at 0.986V |
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| Noelle diligently taking down the results. |
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| Tomato clocks in at 0.929 V |
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| Lemon tests at 0.996 V |
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| Here are the results measured in Volts |
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