Hello everyone. I am Ilham Kadri, the Chief Executive Officer of Solvay, a science and specialty company.

I always loved sciences. By the way, I am a chemical engineer and a doctor in polymer chemistry.

Did you know that chemistry is all around you? Did you know that chemistry can clean the air you breathe, purify the water you drink, produce the alcoholic gels you use to combat diseases like COVID-19? In fact, even our bodies are made out of chemicals.

Without it, we can't find sustainable solutions to fight climate change, for example, to help preserve our planet, to recycle the used products.

In fact, chemistry enables circularity.

I am here today at Solvay's Battery Research and Innovation Centre in Brussels, Belgium.

This is where we do all of our research on solid-state batteries to invent the batteries of tomorrow.

As you know, there are batteries everywhere around you, in toys, in cell phones, computers, in cars, and we want them to be safe, long-lasting, powerful and clean.

So we are in a real lab today, and that's the reason why I'm wearing lab coats, as you can see, and safety goggles.

And I invite you, if you are running a chemical experiment, you must always wear protective equipment like me, because this is what we are going to do today.

So why goggles? It's to keep any liquids from an experiment away from you, away from your eyes and hurting you.

I'm going to do an experiment today with lemon here.

And you probably know that lemon juice is an acid, so we don't want it to get into your eyes.

In fact, today we are going to create a battery together. Did you know that a battery is actually a tiny chemical factory? I will show you the science that's inside.

Anyone can actually create one. How? Very simple.

With lemons. Isn't that amazing? The lemon battery is actually similar to the first electrical battery that was invented back in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, who used, in fact, brine, that's water with a lot of salt, instead of lemon juice.

We are going to find out about the type of chemical reaction, we call it oxidoreduction, that occurs inside the batteries.

Inside, you have two different metals that are the electrodes, it's basically zinc and copper and electrolytes, which is the lemon juice.

The whole idea is to create an electrical current that will flow between the two electrodes.

So pay close attention now and let's get into action.

So what are the ingredients we need to start building our battery? You need a coin cell battery here, a lithium coin cell battery with a small lead.

You need three lemons you can find in the grocery. You need a multimeter here to measure the voltage.

You need another light. You need five cents coin, which are made of copper, as you know.

And you need a few zinc coated washers and finally wires for the electrical connection.

So we have our lithium coin cell, which is small, but powerful enough to produce light from a light emitting diode.

Look at this. And we want to do the same with the lemon.

So now we'll slice the lemon. The slices must be too thin, but narrow enough.

Just like this. So now let's take the coins to produce the cathode of the cell and insert two coins into one side and they need to touch each other's.

And then our washers, which I'm going to insert in the second slice like this.

The metals, as you can see, need to be close to each other in order for the necessary electrochemical reaction to take place.

So let's now measure the voltage that our battery generates with this multimeter.

Let me do it. And you can see here on the multimeter that it's about one volt.

This is not enough to produce light from our lead. So we need to duplicate the experiments with the other, in fact, two lemons we prepared so that we can reach three volts.

So now, in fact, we can connect the three batteries to have an electrical series and we'll connect the cathode of the first battery with the anode of the second battery.

And here we go. Let me show you here.

Here we are. So we connected the three lemons. And finally, you can connect the light with the battery that we just produced.

Let's see how it works. You connect the cables here, the wires with our battery.

And as you can see, the lead is on. So our experiment is successful.

The voltage of the battery is now close to three volts. That's how much we need to produce light from LED.

So we've created a battery together. You can do it too. I hope you enjoyed it.

In fact, we need more batteries and we need better chemistry to help us not only meet the rising demand for clean mobility, for example, but also to be more sustainable to help combat climate change, an urgent challenge for our planet and future generations.

The answers rely in science, in chemistry.

Thanks to chemistry, we can innovate. We can continue to progress beyond.

So I hope you enjoyed it. As you can see, it's not very complicated.

And now it's your turn. Do it, but do it safely. Thank you.