Scientists develop anode based on mushroom

American scientists have developed an anode for a lithium-ion battery based on large mushrooms. After heating, the material of the mushrooms appears to exhibit porous properties that make it useful for the batteries.

The researchers at the University of California, Riverside, used pieces of portobello mushrooms for their study. The mushroom pieces were heated to 500, 700, 900 or 1100 degrees Celsius. The biomass has a carbon nanostrip-like structure and after heating above 900 degrees Celsius the pyrolized material appeared to become ‘hierarchically porous’. The pores varied in size from nanometers to tens of nanometers, making them micro-, meso- and macro-porous, according to the researchers.

These properties make the biomass a suitable anode material. The high concentration of potassium in mushrooms also means that more pores in the material are activated over time, the scientists suspect, causing the capacity to gradually increase. When tested with the anode in a coin cell battery, a capacity of 260mAh/g was still observed after 700 charge cycles.

Today’s anodes for lithium-ion batteries are made of synthetic graphite. However, the costs of producing these are high and the processing produces harmful waste. Science has therefore been looking for a sustainable, cheap candidate for years. “With materials like this, future phones may have longer battery life instead of diminishing it,” hopes a student in the Materials Science and Engineering department at the University of California, Riverside.

The research is published under the title Bio-Derived, Binderless, Hierarchically Porous Carbon Anodes for Li-ion Batteries at Nature Scientific Reports.