The world’s smelliest fruit could soon be charging your phone

Researchers at the University of Sydney developed a method to turn waste from the durian fruit, aka the world’s smelliest fruit, into a super-capacitors that could be used to charge electronic devices and even cars.

Super-capacitators are a sort of energy reservoirs that dole out energy smoothly. They can quickly store large amounts of energy within a small battery-sized device and then supply energy to charge electronic devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops, within a few seconds.

To make the super-capacitators, the researchers use a non-toxic and non-hazardous green engineering method which included the heating in water and freeze drying of the biomass of durians. In doing so, the fruit is turned into a stable carbon aerogel, an extremely light and porous synthetic material used for a range of applications. The method also works with jackfruit.

Carbon aerogels make great super-capacitators, because they are very porous. The researchers used the aerogels to make electrodes which turned out to have exceptional energy storage properties.