today's video is sponsored by copilot an affordable fitness app for more on that later whether you need to start your car survive the apocalypse or rebuild civilization the rechargeable lead acid battery is a crucial game changer with it you can capture and store energy for use later and if you pair it with a generator you're basically building a power plant so let's see what it takes to try and recreate this technology and see if I can build my own power plant and enter the age of electricity [Music] I often get compared to the Manga and
Anime series Dr Stone which explores a similar concept of rebuilding the Technologies of civilization and I previously explored some of the more far-fetched ideas of trying to make electrical wire in this video I'm taking inspiration from two devices they built in the series the lead acid battery and the Primitive generator in one of my earlier videos we made the first form of the battery the voltaic pile this invention opened the door to the world of batteries and electricity but these batteries were only single use once depleted there was no way to recharge them effectively all
the energy that is spent smelting the two metals of copper and zinc is expelled when the battery is used in 1859 the first rechargeable battery was made using a combination of lead electrodes and sulfuric acid the dissolved sulfate ions and the lead will produce a chemical reaction to form lead sulfate and release energy this reaction is then reversible allowing energy to be put back into the battery and recharging it for future use a few years ago I made a trip out to Galena Illinois area to collect lead that's kind of a weird Choice back then
especially with a modern understanding of Legends toxicity there's not really a whole lot you can do with lead a Fairmont was done with it historically but it's not really the safest to work with in the end we really have only used lead for a slingshot but besides being kind of the earliest metal that was first smelted and kind of paved the way for other metals I also knew it was going to be really important for more modern applications like specifically this lead acid battery so after a few years it's nice to finally get back to
this metal and what I had in mind when I first got it and now I can finally make a batter using this metal so basically with a lead acid battery there's two parts this is a little bit difficult to follow but there's the lead and then there's the acid those are the two components for a light acid battery so now thanks to our adventurers a few years ago and collecting this lead and learning how to smelt it we now have lead to work with and we can actually start putting it to use for a pretty
useful application of a rechargeable battery what we're really trying to do is maximize surface area so it's going to increase the amount of power we're able to generate with this so let's take some of these ingots melted down somewhere with good ventilation and pour out some really flat sheets and then hammer it to even flatter and then we can use these as the electrodes for our battery foreign [Music] lead acid battery and that leaves hope you're following me with this the acid protecting is even more confusing it doesn't even actually have to be in acids
apparently they can use sulfates and these are basically salts formed from sulfuric acid a lot of them are naturally occurring and I've actually collected a few different ones and we can test these all out and see what's going to give us the best results so here we have concentrated sulfuric acid this is sodium sulfate and we collected this in Wyoming near Independence Rock we collected water from this Lake next door was high in sodium carbonate or soda ash so it was very useful for making glass and soap but on the shore tends to be a
little bit more higher concentration of sodium sulfate and then we have calcium sulfate and this is basically drywall plaster the main chemical in those things we collected these out of the crystal in Arizona so that is also an option the big issue with probably the calcium sulfate is it's not very soluble in water so we're not going to get too much of it to actually go into solution and it's probably going to prevent it from being too effective or at least one of these should work so I'm going to mix them into different solutions of
water here plug in our lead charge up the batteries and see which one is the most effective battery so test them out and see what works best as I go through in each of these and test it and can tell I do get some voltage but it's barely any measured in millivolts there might be some sort of residual charge but it's minuscule or nothing so let's put some current into them and see how much power they can store we can get back we have our three different solutions of electrolytes connected with lead on each side
and that should basically make the battery we're just going to use a DC power supply here to charge them up definitely some bubbles in the sodium sulfate there's definitely a lot more in the sulfuric acid I can't tell if there's any the calcium sulfate it's just so milky all right it's been about 20 minutes here let's see if we have any charge all right look at that we had almost two volts there not too far off 1.7 volts well the same oh a pretty good results the results for all three were surprisingly comparable so I'm
gonna go with sodium sulfate which is a pretty benign compound and if it's safer to mess around with than a bunch of sulfuric acid comes to a battery like this the amount of power and amperage you get it's highly dependent on the surface area of the two electrodes my first attempt I figured I'd try to maximize that by kind of zigzagging them like this for each side but then I found out that it also can maximize the amperage is the proximity of the two layers and you can get them super close went through and coiled
two long sheets of lead and separate them with a piece of linen so they don't actually touch in short and then wrapped it up we have that in here so for both of them their voltage is about the same a little bit under two but this one I was able to get an amperage around a half an amp which is actually pretty good compared to the other batteries I made but with this one I charged it overnight and I could actually get it up to at least briefly 12 amps so that is really impressive for
battery like this we're still a little bit of a magnitude away from actually making a car battery without required a couple hundred amps so pretty impressive with the amount of power that these guys can actually contain so I think we're gonna go with the coil design and make an array of these batteries to actually powers something [Music] I was able to make 13 of these coiled batteries depending on how I wire them I could get up to 20 some volts not bad for a handmade battery the end goal of this video is all about converting
physical energy into stored electrical energy but before we get started charging my batteries it might be best to charge my own physical batteries I'm just going to take some physical labor to run this generator if you're like me you live a busy lifestyle where it gets challenging to stay committed to a physical training program life often gets in the way making it hard to keep the routine and any hiccup or doubt about the process can be an easy excuse to put off working out for another day the past four weeks I've been using copilot and
I found it really helpful to prevent these common hangups to building a new healthy workout routine with copilot you get paired up with an expert coach to create a personalized workout program just for you based on your own goals and the equipment that you have available this works great for me as I personally hate gym memberships and their tricky membership terms and my life is too busy and variable to have any kind of locked in specific time each day with a personal trainer copilot gives you kind of The Best of Both Worlds where you get
the accountability and support from a real person with the flexibility to work out on your own schedule using copilot has helped develop some healthy habits and gain a little bit more confidence in my fitness journey copilot is different from other Fitness companies it's not just an app but a human connection with my coach they're personalized workout programs and the flexibility to work on my own schedule have been a real game changer over 75 percent of co-pilot clients continue to work out after 100 days making them nine times more successful at sticking to their goals if
you're ready to take charge of your fitness journey click the link in the description to get your free trial with copilot so now that I put together an array of batteries that actually have a pretty powerful battery there's some real potential but at this point I've been kind of cheating because I've been using just modern electricity with a DC power supply to charge up and kind of measure the potential of these batteries if you exist in world without electricity you can't really do that that's gonna be the second part of this video is about actually
powering it so one potential is you do things like the voltaic pile you make a chemical battery like this where the energy is kind of stored the chemical imbalance between zinc and copper all the energy you put into smelt all these different Metals is then extracted through the reaction between them as they try to achieve a lower energy state so that could be an option if you build big enough I'll take pile you can use that to charge these lead acid batteries I think the more useful and interesting solution is going to be to actually
build a generator that can then turn physical Force into electrical stored energy when we combine that with our batteries we're basically building a power plant taking some inspiration from Dr Stone they build a very interesting one that is best compared to a homopolar generator invented by fair day pretty early on in history it's basically the first form of an electric generator it's really not that powerful and it's probably not worth trying to build so I'm not going to dive too deep into building this all the way but I do want to try and recreate roughly
what we see in the comic and see if there's ways to improve it to make it a little bit more useful and we can kind of see what the potential of this really is so the basic concept of it is you have a big copper disk in that case they actually do two and then when you spin them you also have magnets in between them and basically the interaction of the copper and the magnets kind of creates a flow of electrons which then when you hook it up to wires you get basically electricity so the
last one to charge up the batteries I'm going to try that out and we can see how well that actually works [Applause] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] millivolts that is not much all right so we got the pretty much completed homopolar generator as it's depicted in the anime so as far as I can tell I believe this is about the setup they had a magnet is a little a little bit different sized I don't recall them showing the wiring of it too much but basically electricity is going to be uh generated between differences in the
in the inner part of the ring in the outer part of the Ring ultimately the second disc is not really necessary uh it's just a I think double your output by doing it twice at the same time should be able to test this with just one of them the effects of the magnets on the copper disc will cause kind of a flow of electrons and there'll be some sort of difference between the inner and outer part so then by connected wires we're able to complete a circuit that should hopefully uh generate some electricity let's give
it a crankton see see if we get anything so we got it hooked up to both of them now so we're basically one goes into the other two kind of should hopefully double the amount we get I think that's the only purpose we're having two discs between just the one I got it's gonna get a relatively stable five millivolts which is not a lot of voltage and that's kind of to be expected with this design it was never really used for any practical purposes it's just kind of the first form of a generator that's discovered
and then quickly replaced by one's a little bit more effective in theory it does seem to work so let's see what kind of voltage I can get with closest replication to what they do in the anime foreign about what I expected I thought I'd go up to probably 30 millivolts which is about appropriate for doubling it but uh overall this design is not not really going to be the most effective but I'm going to try and tweak it and add some improvements so it made some improvements to the generator here to see if we can
get a little bit better result uh the other one was basically a replication of the Dr Stone model had some success in getting at least something but not very much so this has basically uh improved the things that's a little bit more sturdy I got a threaded Rod here rather than the large magnets on each side I switched it with a couple hundred small really powerful magnets it's actually kind of a huge pain to glue all several hundred of them along the diameter of these wood rings and try to get them to actually hold there
well they want to push each other away was a lot of fun and then because there's still a little bit of a gap between them I put pieces of sheet metal cut them to the shape of the disc here and kind of drill the kind of average out magnetic because we get a relatively consistent magnetic field all along the perimeter of here that's probably the biggest uh shortcoming of the Dr Stone design is we have the main that's just in one section and then the rest of the rotation it's kind of losing the charge so
here we have a consistent magnetic field all the way around did it's definitely an improvement but it's it's not nearly as much as I had hoped for the modern effort of trying to build this it's been a couple weeks now of just tweaking and trying to get this thing to work and trying a few different models I found doing kind of more miniature ones seemed to be able to get a little bit more consistent voltage out of it I think is going to be the main limiting factor as far as I can tell so I've
been trying to do a few different versions of this to try and address potential shortfalls of this and I'm really kind of drawing a blank on what exactly is not quite working out because the results I'm getting from all of these is not as high as it's supposed to be and I don't know if the the copper is too thin if it's just too flexible then I can't maintain good contact with the brushings and that's definitely an issue here try gluing some wood to the disc to be a little bit more rigidity try different powers
of magnets it's very frustrating I have to say because this is a device that was never really had any practical use so it's it's kind of annoying to spend a lot of time trying to get it to to work for something that's not really of any value trying to get it to work as best as possible and it's still falling a lot shorter than I hoped unfortunately these batteries are actually surprising really potent I have so many of them that I can stack the voltage between them so after charging each one individually I should be
able to connect them all together and hopefully get some kind of voltage is usable I think we're probably looking at at least one volt to really do too much light up an itty bitty LED most of them charged up and connect them together and see see what exactly we can get out of this the end result of all of this work and all these different generators to try and power up my battery is under a volt and that's pretty disappointing um I was hoping the least get a few volts especially when everything is stacked we're
at maybe 0.7 which means just a fraction of a volts in each of these that's being stacked to actually make anything and the end result is less than a double A battery this is just a first step and I kind of just wanted to explore the old doctor Stone generator it's a very interesting concept just how simple it appears with a magnet and some copper disks that does work in theory we are generating some amount of electricity it's just very minuscule actually making a generator like this primitively and expecting it to actually have some value
is pretty far-fetched it does have in theory some potential there's just so many things that can go wrong and I think I managed to do all of them the light battery low itself is actually I would consider a pretty good success and something I'll be using again in the future hopefully with a more efficient generator sometime soon very impressed with the results from the battery very unimpressed with the homopolar generator so when it comes to electronics that's going to be the next goal is building a generator that way it can actually power a battery a
bit more and then start using this battery for some further electronic work I think again to all of our supporters on patreon without you this channel would be possible thanks for watching thanks again to co-pilot for sponsoring today's video if you need some help recharging your own battery consider copilot in a four Bowl fitness app the last four weeks of using it myself have been incredibly helpful for building a healthier routine for myself and improving My Own Strength with some customized workouts for my personal trainer it's easy to get distracted and dissuaded from building a
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