High School Science Fair Projects

High school science fair projects are the most challenging for students, teachers and parents. One of the most exceptional winning high school science fair projects is making a potato battery. Research has shown that this was a big science fair project winner in 2006.

Batteries create electricity when a chemical reaction occurs between two electrodes and one electrolyte. Using copper and zinc electrodes and sulphuric acid as an electrolyte are proven to create a battery. But what else can be used? It has now been proven that a potato can be used as an electrolyte due to the abundance of fluids that potatoes carry.

The problem with this science fair project is can electricity be conducted using a potato?

The hypothesis is that the juice from a potato contains water-soluble chemicals that can cause a chemical reaction with one or both electrodes. This may cause electricity to form.

The materials needed to conduct the experiment are:

• A fresh potato
• Copper electrode
• Zinc electrode
• A meter to measure voltage and the amount of electricity produced
• Alligator clips

Insert the copper and zinc electrodes into the potato, fairly close but not meeting each other. Use clips to connect the electrodes to the meter to determine the amount of electricity between two electrodes passing through the meter. To get the zinc electrode you can remove the outer casing of a broken battery.

This experiment will show that a digital meter will show a reading of a certain number of volts between the electrodes and the analog meter will show a much lower reading. This is because the analog metre cannot read the voltage unless the electricity is produced much more quickly. This is also because an analog meter only gets its electricity from the potato where the digital meter draws its power from a battery and no electricity is actually taken from the potato.

You can create this experiment using almost any fruit or vegetable and the results will be very similar. In all cases there will not be enough energy produced to turn on a small light as the amount of voltage is quite small.

However you can connect several potato batteries and it will make enough electricity to light a super bright light emitting diode. Another thing that can be learned from this experiment is that it is simple to create a battery and create electricity. What is not simple is to create a large amount of energy for a long period of time.

Not only is this one of the top winning high school science fair projects, but it is also a lot of fun to do! Creating a battery through vegetables is not one would normally think of doing so it peaks the curiosity. Seeing something like this happen, that you created, can be quite a rush!

Note: See the Disclaimer before starting this project.