Lemon battery
simple battery made with a lemon for educational purposes
A lemon battery is a simple battery often made for the purpose of education. Typically, a piece of zinc metal (such as a galvanized nail) and a piece of copper (such as a penny) are inserted into a lemon and connected by wires. Power generated by reaction of the metals is used to power a small device such as a light-emitting diode (LED).
The lemon battery is similar to the first electrical battery invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, who used brine (salt water) instead of lemon juice. The lemon battery illustrates the type of chemical reaction (oxidation-reduction) that occurs in batteries. The zinc and copper are the electrodes, and the juice inside the lemon is the electrolyte. There are many variations of the lemon cell that use different fruits (or liquids) as electrolytes and metals other than zinc and copper as electrodes.
Use in school projects
There are numerous sets of instructions for making lemon batteries and for obtaining components such as light-emitting diodes, (LEDs), electrical meters (multimeters), and zinc-coated (galvanized) nails and screws. Commercial "potato clock" science kits include electrodes and a low-voltage digital clock. After one cell is assembled, a multimeter can be used to measure the voltage or the electric current from the voltaic cell; a typical voltage is 0.9 V with lemons.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lemon battery” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.