There are a whole range of plants that have been called superfoods for their amazing claimed health benefits because of the nutrients they contain. But plants can have other super powers too. For example, some are better at absorbing Carbon Dioxide to help with climate change, others provide medicines, or can strip our pollutants out of the air or soil. But one, Aloe Vera, is a super-plant in a new way. It can now store electricity that could be used to power portable devices – by plugging them into the plant.
Capacitors are one of the basic electronic components, like resistors and transistors, that electronic circuits are built from. They act a bit like a tiny battery, building up charge on a pair of surfaces with an insulator between so that charge cannot move directly from one to the other. Electrons build up on one plate, storing energy. When the capacitor is discharged that energy is released. They have a variety of uses including evening out power supplies. A supercapacitor is just a capacitor that can store a lot more energy so is a little like a tiny rechargeable battery, though releases the energy faster and can be charged and discharged many more times.
Various teams around the world have explored the use of aloe vera in supercapacitors. A team of researchers, led by Yang Zhao from Beijing Institute of Technology, has succeeded in creating a supercapacitor made completely from materials extracted from the plant (apart from one gold wire). The parts were made by heating a part of the leaf of the plant, and by freezing its juice. The advantage of this is that the supercapacitor is biodegradable unlike traditional ones made from oil-based synthetic materials. It also makes them biocompatible in that they can be inserted into aloe vera and similar plants without doing them harm and potentially make use of electricity generated by the plant. Her team has inserted these tiny capacitors inside other plants including cacti and aloe vera plants to show this idea works in principle.
So plants can be superheroes and aloe vera more than most: it looks nice on your window cill, you can make soap from it, it supposedly has medicinal value, it is being used in research to remove pollutants from the air and soon it could provide you with electricity too. So next time you are lost in a cactus filled wilderness make sure you have aloe vera capacitors with you so you can charge your gadgets while waiting to be rescued.
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This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
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