Forget the home battery: the foundation of your home is equally suitable for storing energy. MIT engineers have made a super capacitor of abundant materials such as cement, soot and water. A boost for the energy transition.
Cement and soot can form the basis for a new, cheap energy storage system according to a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The findings of this breakthrough appeared at the end of July in the scientific journal PNAS. intelligent controller series
The researchers believe that their super capacitor could eventually be built into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day of energy without touching the structural strength of the building. They also see a concrete roadway that can charge contactless electric cars that drive on this road.
Capacitors consist of two electrically conductive plates, immersed in an electrolyte and separated by a membrane. Just like the two poles of a rechargeable battery, the two plates of the capacitor work with an equal voltage. The amount of energy that a capacitor can store depends on the total surface of the conductive plates.
The new Supercondensator is based on a method to create a material based on cement with an extremely high internal surface due to a closed, interconnected network of conductive material within the bulk volume. The researchers achieved this by adding soot - which is very conductive - to a concrete mixture and having the whole hardened.
“Cement is the most material made by humans in the world. We combine that with Black Carbon, a kind of soot. That is a well -known historical material that also written the dead sea -rolls. If you merge those at least two millennia old materials in a specific way, they form a conductive nanocomposite, "explains Admir Masic, professor of MIT and one of the authors of the study.
These super capacitors have a great potential to help with the global transition to renewable energy, says one of the other authors, Franz-Josef Ulm. “Wind, solar and tidal energy deliver electricity at variable times that often do not match the peaks in electricity consumption, so we must be able to store energy. Existing batteries are expensive and usually dependent on materials such as lithium, the stock of which is limited. ”
The team behind this breakthrough demonstrated the process by making small super capacitors of about 1 centimeter in diameter and 1 millimeter thick, each of which could be charged to 1 volt. They then connected three to have an LED light of 3 volts light up. Now they want to make a prototype the size of a typical 12 volt car battery to finally work up to a version of 45 cubic meters, with which they can store the average daily electricity consumption for a household on energy.
They also experienced an interaction between the storage capacity of the material and the structural strength. By adding more soot, the super capacitor can store more energy, but the concrete is slightly weaker. This can be useful for applications where the concrete does not play a structural role or where the full strength of concrete is not required. "So it's really a multifunctional material," says Ulm.
He sees the super capacitor as "a new way to look to the future of concrete as part of the energy transition."
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