Cellphone battery dead? Just power it with your pee

If you look around the Internet, you might find hackers trying to charge their cellphones with fire, water, or some other brow-raising power source, but I bet you’ve never seen anyone charge their phone with their own urine.

Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a collaboration between the University of the West of England and University of Bristol, have developed and successfully tested a way to charge your cellphone using urine.

Dr. Ioannis Ieropoulos charges this Samsung phone with urine power. (Image via University of the West of England, YouTube)
  
Until now, nobody has ever harnessed electricity from urine.

Dr. Ioannis Ieropoulos from the University of the West of England has been working for years trying to generate electricity from odd sources using microbial fuel cells.

How it works

A microbial fuel cell (MFC) is an energy converter that turns organic matter directly into electricity using the metabolism of live microorganisms. The team describes the electricity generated as a by-product of the microbes’ natural life cycle.

Dr. Ieropoulos holds up an individual microbial fuel cell. (Image via University of the West of England, YouTube)

Therefore the more they eat things like urine, the more energy they can produce, and for longer periods of time. Basically, the more you pee, the longer your phone can stay charged.

A cascade of MFCs generating energy from the urine in the bottles. (Image via University of the West of England, YouTube)

Until now, the team has only been able to store low levels of energy produced by the microbial fuel cells into capacitors or supercapacitors, allowing only short charge cycles. This is the first time they’ve ever been able to charge a device directly.

“One product that we can be sure of an unending supply is our own urine. The beauty of this fuel source is that we are not relying on the erratic nature of the wind or the sun; we are actually reusing waste to create energy,” said Dr. Ieropoulos.

So far, they were able to charge a Samsung phone from the power harnessed as urine passed through a channel of microbial fuel cells, but just enough to send out texts, do a little web surfing, and make a short phone call.

“The concept has been tested and it works — it's now for us to develop and refine the process so that we can develop MFCs to fully charge a battery,” said Dr. Ieropoulos.

The team believes that this kind of technology has the potential to appear in bathrooms in order to capture the energy from our urine to power showers, lighting, and razors (and of course our cell phones).

The bathroom fun doesn’t end here. Dr. Ieropoulos and team are currently bidding for funding to develop a smart toilet with partners in the United States and South Africa.

Intrigued? Watch the video below to see Dr. Ieropoulos take a bottle half-filled with human urine and pump it through a cascade or MFCs to charge a phone right before your eyes.

Story via University of the West of England.