How You Can Use Powdered Doughnuts to Collect Solar Energy

All you really need are store-bought doughnuts, vodka, and tea.

Nick Rose

Nick Rose

Photo via Flickr user lesleyk, modified by MUNCHIES. 

Ever wondered how to extract solar power from powdered doughnut? Yeah, neither had we.

But we recently caught wind that thanks to wikiHow, you can do it yourself, and it involves little more than doughnuts, tea, vodka, and a lot of patience.

The basis of solar energy is the solar cell—meaning, essentially, any device that can convert the energy from light into electricity. Given that doughnuts are as readily available as sunlight in most parts of America, they just might be an inevitable solution for a sustainable form of energy and a pretty cute home science project (or doomsday prepper plan).

Image via wikiHow.

Not just any old doughnut can be turned into a solar cell; it has to be the powdered variety dusted in a bright, white coating and usually purchased from a convenience store or gas station. The reason that those doughnuts are ridiculously white is because that edible dust contains titanium dioxide, a chemical used primarily to make white paint, but also occasionally added to coffee creamer, certain types of cheese, and powdered sugar to make them even whiter.

Aside from its powerful food-whitening properties, titanium dioxide can also be used to turn light into an electrical current, and is most easily findable atop store-bought doughnuts. You want to be using pure titanium dioxide for this, so you're going to have to dissolve and bake that powder in order to get rid of the pesky fats and sugars inside.

Once that's done, all you need to do is make a titanium dioxide solution with an alcohol of sorts—ethanol works best, but you can also use vodka—to coat some conductive glass, which you'll then heat up. Feel free to eat the naked, leftover doughnuts and take a swig of that vodka while you purify your powder even more.

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Finally, grab some dark tea such as hibiscus, which contains compounds called anthocyanins that are really good at capturing light; it make your cell capable of picking up both UV and visible light.

In less time than it takes to cook a batch of meth (which we don't recommend, by the way), you're basically ready to hook your doughnut cell to a multimeter, haul it into the sunshine, and generate some of the power you need to make even more doughnuts. Science is cool, huh?