Fruit Powered Batteries: A New Guinness World Record
Image by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Professor Saiful Islam (Oxford Materials' Statutory Chair of Materials Modelling from January 2022) joined forces with the Royal Society of Chemistry in November 2021 to claim back the Guinness World Record for the largest fruit powered battery.
Saiful originally claimed the world record in 2016 during his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, but it was broken last year by a group in Denmark with their 1,521 volts. This year, however, Saiful and a team at the Royal Society of Chemistry used nearly 3,000 lemons to achieve 2,307.8 volts, and reclaim the world record.
You can watch a behind-the-scenes film of how the battery was prepared and the moment the official title from the World Guinness Records was granted - and the use of the power generated by the lemons' voltage to enable some pyrotechnics to start a Go-Kart race.
Congratulations to Saiful and the Royal Society of Chemistry!
