Mini Project: Making a lemon battery

A lemon battery has a simple logic behind it; you insert two metals, zinc and copper to it, which would act as positive and negative electrodes as the acidic lemon juice enables the flow of electrons through it. This when attached to an LED, using electrical wires, would supply enough power to enable it to glow. When I tried it in practicality, I started with attaching an LED to one lemon battery. I realized that the voltage produced by one lemon was not enough to light up an LED. Upon experimenting and connecting several lemons together we were finally able to produce the voltage of around 2V. However, when we measured this using a multimeter, it fluctuated a lot. Probably this was the reason behind the LED still not lighting up. The fact that, despite doing so much, the LED didn’t light up, was disappointing. However, the battery was functional, as measured by the Multimeter. During the process one of the major difficulties faced was finding the materials. Copper wires were easily available, but we needed a source of zinc. We asked around for galvanized nails for the same, but the shopkeepers didn’t have that knowledge themselves (whether the nails that they sold were galvanized). After looking around at all the possible places, we landed up on one of the hardware stores in Yelahanka New Town where they did possess galvanized nails. Overall, the project was accomplished as we did make the battery which was functional, however it wasn’t demonstrated properly by lighting up an LED.