Green Energy Generation from the Industrial Waste Red Mud as Hydroelectric Cell

Red Mud is a highly alkaline and toxic waste product generated in large quantities during alumina refining. Huge quantities of red mud are improperly disposed off regularly, contaminating land, water, and air which pose alarming environmental challenges. Converting red mud to energy material for hydroelectric cell is a sustainable solution to save the environment. Red mud is translated to defective and porous structure by adding ZnS through solid state reaction process. Dislocation density in red mud crystallite found to be increased from 5.93 x104 to 13.03x104 by adding ZnS due to defects creation. SEM images clearly show increase in porous microstructure of the composite. Red mud based hydroelectric cell generated current 8 mA, and voltage 0.96 V that increased to 13 mA and 0.98 V by 10 wt% ZnS addition. Charge transfer resistance of red mud drastically decreased from 80.7  to 4.4 , thus decreased the activation loss and increased the current generated in red mud-ZnS composite. Transforming red mud into hydroelectric cell presents a sustainable waste-to-energy solution that could revolutionize energy security and environmental pollution.