King’s Power-A Novel Green Synthesis of Carbon Materials from Renewable Resources for Zinc-Carbon Battery Applications.

The idea of dramatically reducing the cost of the production dry cell, reducing its carbon footprint, and being able to be an alternative to current materials such as biochars really propels the interest of performing this project research. Biochars from durian husk, bamboo and coconut shell are promising alternative chemical materials of the cathode pastes in the dry cell due to their eco-friendly traits and availability in the trophic areas which covers about 40% of the land on earth. Using the technique of pyrolysis, the latest and the best technique to produce a high carbon content biochars, the dry cell uses the potassium hydroxide as the electrolyte and manganese dioxide as the catalysts that make the biochar mixture to produce maximum voltage of 65% from the dry cell sold in the current market. The voltage analysis of the biochar dry cell was done in our school science laboratory and then, characterization tests analysis was carried out on the products from the specific biomass namely the SEM/EDX analysis, at the Material Characterization Laboratory (MCL), Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University Putra Malaysia. Based on our research, the biochar obtained from the raw materials (Durian Husk, Bamboo and Coconut Shell) had shown different characteristics. The bamboo biochar had shown the most amount of carbon content which is 86.64% more than the durian husk biochar (72.77%) and coconut shell biochar (65.57%). On the other hand, based on the micrograph, we observed that the durian husk biochar had shown much created pores rather than bamboo biochar and coconut shell biochar. In our study, we found out that the average voltage produced by the three different biochars have shown that Durian Husk char dry cell produced the highest voltage which is 0.97V, more than the bamboo char (0.62V) and coconut shell char (0.73V). In conclusion, the biochar dry cell produced are much cheaper in term of its production as our biochar dry cell uses biomass that are freely available and comes from renewable source of energy, the best ingredient for Green Technology.