How to Make a Lemon Battery (Chemistry)

This video shows how to generate electricity from a lemon. Supplies include a copper wire and a zinc-coated (galvanized) nail. The video also goes into how lemon batteries work.

▶️ Get supplies for the lemon batter experiment:
beardedscienceguy.com/how-to-make-lemon-battery

▶️ How to make a lemon battery:
1. Gently sand the ends of a zinc galvanized nail and a piece of copper wire to remove any metal oxides which may have formed. You just need to sand enough to expose the zinc and copper underneath.

2. Roll a lemon on the table to break open the juice compartments inside.

3. Push the copper wire and zinc nail into opposite sides of the lemon. Make sure they don't touch each other inside the lemon. These pieces of metal create positive and negative terminals for your battery.

3. Test the voltage with a hand-held meter. Our battery here puts out just under one volt of electric potential. The calculator requires one and a half volts, so we'll connect two lemon batteries in this series.

4.Open the case to the calculator and locate the battery compartment.

5. Remove the battery and break the wires free from the case. Now you're ready to connect the lemon battery to your calculator.

6. Connect the copper to the red wire and the zinc to the black wire. At this point, your calculator should turn on and work as normal.

▶️ How a lemon battery works:
Zinc atoms will break apart into a positive ion and two free electrons. The positive ion will go into solution with the lemon juice, while the electrons will flow across the conductor toward the copper, eventually making their way back into solution to meet up with two H+ ions and form hydrogen gas.

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