Thermochemistry: 

You Have the Power 

By: Grant, Vivienne. Adam, and Josh 
 
Pictures 

 
 
 
What We Built 
The device we built is called a voltaic pile, which consists of 
multiple voltaic cells stacked one on top of another. Each voltaic cell is 
made up of an anode on top of an electrolyte on top of a cathode. From 
our research, we found that the most common way to construct a voltaic 
cell was using small zinc squares for the anode, some material soaked in 
salt water for the electrolyte, and small copper squares for the cathode. 
 
 
Modifications 
We made 4 total modifications to our project, each one pushing our 
project toward greater success. 
- Issue 1: We were originally using cardboard soaked in salt water for 
our electrolyte layer, but it commonly split apart and would dry 
quickly, which meant we had to swap out the cardboard every time 
we wanted to test if it worked, which slowed down the process a 
whole lot. 
 - Modification: We instead swapped to felt, which we had a 
more limited amount of, but was better in every other category 
that we cared about. They were easily soakable, retained the 
salt water very well, and seemed to be able to hold 
significantly more liquid, all of which helped a lot. 
- Issue 2: At this point, things should have been going well, but the 
multimeter would only occasionally show something other than 0. 
We pretty quickly figured out that our stack was very unstable, so 
we weren’t getting a constant connection, and we needed someone 
to hold it together if we were going to test it. 
- Modification: We tried taping voltaic cells together in sets of 4, 
and then stacking 3 of those piles any time we needed to test. 
- Issue 3: Our project now fairly consistently outputting energy, but 
stacking small piles for testing was annoying, and hadn’t fully fixed 
issue #2.  
- Modification: We fixed this issue by simply clamping the entire 
stack together and then taping the entire pile together, so we 
just had one big stack, which finally cleaned up the last issue. 
- Issue 4: Our battery was now working, but not well. We knew 
something else was wrong because our battery should have been 
outputting more voltage than it was. After briefly reviewing our 
research sources, we found that our salt water wasn’t nearly salty 
enough. 
- Modification: The hardest part of this problem was figuring out 
what the problem was, so this was another easy fix, where all 
we had to do was add more salt to our salt water. 
- Issue 5: Our final issue was also our biggest. After leaving our 
project alone for a weekend, our battery yet again had stopped 
working, and after testing it with a multimeter, we had more than 
enough voltage to power our battery, but not enough current. 
- Modification: Since this problem cropped up right before our 
presentation, we only had time to try quick fixes, and the one 
thing we had time to try didn’t actually fix this problem. What 
we tried was to put more wires between the battery and the 
LED, thinking that this may give more paths for electricity to 
flow. 
- Why it didn’t work: Adding more wires didn’t actually 
solve anything for us, as we forgot what we learned in 
Freshman year STEM. Adding more wires didn’t create 
 any new complete circuits since we still only had one 
power source and one resistor, so no new circuits could 
be created following the exact same path as the first. 
 
 
Technical Specifications 
Types of Energy Used 
- Chemical: The p ​ otential ​of a system to have a reaction occur. 
- Electrical: The electrons moving through the wire carry electrical 
energy 
- Light: Photons being released in the LED by electrons jumping down 
an energy level 
 
 
Energy By Trial
Trial  Change  Voltage  Amperage 

1  Initial design  0  0 

2  Switched cardboard to felt  Usually 0  Usually 0 

3  Put our free-floating stack into 4  3.7 V  56 mA 

taped stacks, each with 4 voltaic  (occasionally 0)  (occasionally 0) 
cells 

4  Put the 4 small piles into one big  4.1 V  58 mA 

pile 

5  Roughly tripled the amount of salt  4.5 V  58 mA 

in our saltwater 

6  Connected another wire on the  4.5 V  59 mA 

same path as the first 
 
 
Measurement of energy transfers 
Theoretical Energy 
- E​cell​ = E​reduction​ + E​oxidation 
- Zn​(s)​ + Cu​2+​(aq)​ --> Zn​2+​(aq)​ + Cu​(s) 
- Zn​(s)​ --> Zn​2+​(aq)​ + 2 e​- 
 - Cu​2+​(aq)​ + 2 e​-​--> Cu​(s) 
- E​reduction of Cu​ = +0.339 V 
- E​reduction of Zn​ = -0.762 V 
- E​oxidation of Zn​ = +0.762 V 
- E​cell​ = +1.101 V 
Real Energy 
- 4.5 V -- 16 cells 
- 0.28125 V per cell 
- 0.81975 V that don’t exist 
We did bad things 
- You may have noticed that our voltaic cells were theoretically 
supposed to produce over 1 V per cells and that they very much 
didn’t do that. I expect a lot of this energy is lost because our 
electrolyte isn’t that great. If we had a battery that was able to 
transfer electrons through it better, then I feel we would’ve had a 
higher voltage overall. 
 
 
Molecular Blueprint 

 
 
 
Selling Points 
Our project does not have many selling points, but if you’re willing to 
spin the truth and make some small leaps in logic, our project certainly 
has some ground to work from. 
- Compact 
- The actual battery isn’t very big 
- Easily expandable 
- If you wanted to add more cells, you could easily do so 
- Pieces are very easy to acquire large amounts of 
- If you were to expand the battery, it wouldn’t be hard to get 
the things needed to build it bigger 
- Very simple assembly 
- Constructing a voltaic pile takes barely any fine motor skills 
- Easy to fix our problems 
- All of the things that made our final design less than optimally 
functional could be easily fixed with a little extra time and 
money