Sweet smell of success for biofuel expert

Sugar-powered batteries could be the renewable, eco-friendly power source the planet is gasping for

When Shelley Minteer was working with hydrogen fuel cells, she was always afraid of accidents. Growing worries about the safety issues while teaching students eventually saw her interests turning elsewhere. Minteer is now an assistant professor of chemistry at Saint Louis University in Missouri. At first she worked on creating chemically-selective layers using enzymes for biochemical sensors, but then found her research group coming back to fuel cells.

“We got interested in sugar-powered fuel cells after developing ethanol fuel cells and realising that, energetically, it made more sense to use the sugar directly than to turn sugar into ethanol and then use the ethanol,” she says.
Although using sugar to make electricity sounds surprising, it’s actually not that novel. Peter Bruce, a chemistry professor at the University of St Andrews, says that fuel cells based on glucose have been described before but he reckons that Minteer has found a different approach.

“The new thing here seems to be the use of sugar and an enzyme to break it down. These sort of devices are still a long way off replacing lithium batteries. The power density is very low – about 10 to 100 times lower than alternatives,” he says.

Despite this, Minteer claims that her “sugar battery” is the longest-lasting and most powerful of its type to date. Sugar (as glucose) powers all living things with nature harnessing the available energy in a series of complex enzyme-driven reactions. By adapting her earlier work with the biochemical sensors, the sugar battery – a biological fuel cell – was created.

Guardian