Plan to commercialize supercapacitors in the next few years
A solution that is inexpensive, scales, is not inconvenient, and fits household demands? What’s the catch?
I hope it’s as good as it sounds and becomes a thing.
One of the big catches is how Greenhouse gas intensive concrete production is
concrete seems to be used here for its structural properties, just like we do it today. Their solution doesn’t seem to require it:
If more powerful capacitors are required, they can be made with a larger concentration of carbon black, at the expense of some structural strength. This could be useful for applications where the concrete is not playing a structural role or where the full strength potential of concrete is not required. For applications such as a foundation, or structural elements of the base of a wind turbine, the “sweet spot” is around 10 percent carbon black in the mix, the team says.
I mean, there’s a reason why we’ve taken so long with even electric cars lol I hope this becomes a reality, but moneyed interests will fight tooth and nail.
Edit: Also, they sold the idea of electric cars to us so we wouldn’t question a lack of infrastructure investment in railways which we so desperately need.
The team worked out that a 45 cubic meter material block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete would have enough capacity to store about 10kWh
10kWh is enough to run a house for a day, how much concrete would be in a house with concrete walls?
I mean, its not clear you want to build a house out of concrete walls that aren’t entirely, well, concrete. Even so, its a neat idea, but coming out of the MIT press mill, I’ll not be holding my breath for it to become real. MIT is basically a meme at this point with regards to press releases that don’t manifest into reality.
naturally it depends on the walls and house layout, but just to have an idea: assuming a concrete thickness of 20cm and 4 external walls of 20m x 3m each:
0.2 * 4 * 20 * 3 = 48m^3
probably in the 100-200m^3 ballpark if we count internal walls, which are thinner, but cover more total length.
And I know walls are usually not pure concrete, but functions like energy storage could very well change how we build them.
For a basement with a 5-inch slab and exterior walls are 8 inches, 8ft high and also concrete… Then 45 cubic meters is about what you’d need.
Of course, your basement walls are about as electrically grounded as it gets, so I doubt you’d be able to store power in them. One leak and you’re discharging all that power into the groundwater.
10kWh is enough to run one 110VAC outlet at full capacity for about 10 hours. I don’t know where that 10kWh figure comes from but most American houses use between 15-30kWh per day.
So that 10 foot cube would need to be closer to 15ft cubed. It’s huge. Perhaps the foundation of the structure would work, as someone else mentioned.
Blocks of cement infused with a form of carbon similar to soot could store enough energy to power whole households. A single 3.5-meter block could hold 10kWh of energy, and power a house for a day, and the technology could be commercialized in a matter of years, the scientists say.
This kind of shit comes out of MIT daily and never manifests into reality. They’ve got a great PR team.
Just try this as an exercise. Keep a journal of how many world changing batteries are presented by the MIT PR department from today, through one year. Three years later, open the journal and see how many have found any meaningful application in the real world.
You gave a link to the MIT PR department. Like, yeah, that’s my point. They are phenomenal at tooting their own horn. But the conversion rate to there actually being a there there is extremely low.
Hope this works out. It would be amazing to see new construction using this in foundations. Built in energy storage.
We have already solved this problem, and concrete blocks is not the way to do it.
Water can do the exact same thing, but it flows through pipes and can be moved by pumps, it doesnt “break”, it doesnt require complex moving mechanisms, and it can actually 100% fill a given volume (blocks cannot)
We already do this, right now.
This is the whole “they are trying to re-invent trains again” thing.
Did you read the article? This isn’t gravity storage, they’re making big capacitors by taking advantage of the way carbon black spreads into closely-spaced pockets when added to cement. It would be part of an electrical circuit.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea; I’m not an electrical engineer, so I can’t really assess the benefits and risks. But I don’t think it’s the thing you’re complaining about.
It’s concrete, not cement. Cement is a component, not the end product.
If you leave a bag of portland cement outside and let the rain cures it then that’s a cement block.
And the article mentions both but in contradicting contexts. Is “cement blocks” actually “concrete blocks”? Then later it mentions cement being incorporated into the resulting concrete, so what was the previously mentioned “cement blocks”? Nothing made of cement in the shape of blocks are ever incorporated into concrete. Cement powder is.
Anyway, cool concept. In the mean time, the world also needs to figure out how to make concrete more green, because manufacturing cement releases a lot of greenhouse gases.
