New Breakthrough in Energy Storage – MIT Engineers Create Supercapacitor out of Ancient Materials::Constructed from cement, carbon black, and water, the device holds the potential to offer affordable and scalable energy storage for renewable energy sources. Two of humanity’s most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for
At a claimed energy density of 0.22kWh/m^3 I think their projection of storing enough for an entire household is overly optimistic.
My whole foundation for a 2 story 200m^2 house is about half the 45m^3 they claim is needed for a household.
Sounds promising but it won’t be replacing batteries any time soon.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Seems promising.
A big take away is that you can store a house’s daily use of energy with a 9ft x 9ft cube of the stuff, and since it’s concrete, they say you could use this as a house foundation without issue.
They also talk about integration into the base of wind turbines where they currently just have structure concrete, so this would be a built in energy store.
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Can you put steel reinforcement in it? I didn’t see it mentioned in the article but I could have missed it. Basically any load bearing bit of concrete will have some amount of steel in it to prevent cracking and in heavier structures to add to the strength of the concrete.
Really promising technology though, concrete is basically everywhere so if we can turn it into batteries relatively cheaply that’s absolutely huge.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I doubt it. The carbon acts as the conductor to the cement’s insulator. Adding rebar is likely going to cause issues. I expect this wont have applications in high rises, more akin to a cinder block or poured concrete foundations that wouldn’t need reinforcement.
Might honestly be a fatal flaw for most applications where we currently use concrete, but maybe purpose built devices would still make sense at power plants/etc.