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MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials
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- 1letterunixname 3y agoLooks like a superb material science hack. A potential downside is the predominant production methods for cement aren't great for the climate.
- gnicholas 3y agoThis may be true, but if it's going to be used for housing foundations regardless (because there aren't competitive alternatives), then it's essentially a sunk cost. The fact that you can get a supercapacitor out of your foundation for very low incremental cost is amazing (assuming they can scale the technology as anticipated). One thing I wondered about is what happens as the concrete expands/contracts due to weather, or is fractured when it 'settles' (or if there is an earthquake).
- Perenti 3y agoSurely a fractured supercapacitor is basically a bomb waiting to explode?
- gnicholas 3y agoI know nothing of the topic, but this was the type of thing I reflexively wondered about. Hopefully knowledgeable HNers can fill us in on the likely risks or downsides, which are not typically the focus of university press releases.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoCarbon black is produced by burning petroleum productd, so that oughta bring on the poo-poo squad directly.
- kseistrup 3y agoWould it be possible to produce carbon black from atmospheric CO₂?
- withinboredom 3y agoCan you burn CO₂?
- WJW 3y agoYou can electrolyze CO2 into carbon and oxygen.
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- WJW 3y agoDepends on if it can short its charge to ground I guess, and how fast. An uncharged concrete capacitor is of course pretty harmless even if it cracks, so perhaps you could pour some strain gauges into it so you get advance warning of impending problems.
- boringg 3y ago[flagged]
- K0balt 3y ago[flagged]
- porkbeer 3y agoSo i get the electrolyte, but how does this polarize?
- pengaru 3y agoI get the impression the capacitor has no physical polarity, but polarity is assigned by charging it.
- pakitan 3y agoBy splitting the cube in 2 :) But that would kind of ruin the press release so it's not mentioned. Also, the paper itself mentions no houses nor foundations nor other shit like that. That's only in the press release.
- tromp 3y agoWhen they say capacity increases proportional to volume, do they mean you need to make many alternating thin sheets within that volume?
- WJW 3y agoAs few as two sheets would work. But more would be better, yes.
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- klyrs 3y ago> Two electrodes made of this material, separated by a thin space or an insulating layer, form a very powerful supercapacitor, the researchers found. The image of a huge cube is a bit misleading. If you made a huge cube, you'd probably want a sandwich of thin layers separated by thin film, wired in alternating polarity. Not exactly something you could pour in a foundation.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoSeems to me that the potential of simply lifting a weight up (storage) and down (generation) beats these fancy engineering goals for cost and practicality. Especially if the weight being lifted is a container full of rocks. At first glance there are plenty of those everywhere. No hills or reservoirs needed either. Of course, no papers need to be published ... that may be the goal.
- chrisbrandow 3y agoI’m excited about gravity storage but everything I’ve read indicates that the density and scalability are just not quite feasible.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoIt isn't. Even with pumping water up hill and letting it flow down, which is far easier and more efficient, there just isn't the land, elevation, and water for the scale we need.
- ggm 3y agoThis is one of those sort-of hyperbolic put downs which goes to "we need" encompassing the entire western worlds power requirements. No, you can't replace all existing power sources now and into the future by pumped hydro. Pumped hydro has a massive role to play in power supply, time shifting electricity from renewable sources, providing system resiliency, black start, inductive and inertial load, you-name-it. It also exists. It's in widespread use, across the globe. I have one less than 100km from me here in Qld, there is one under construction in the snowy hydro project (with issues) complementing an existing unit at Tumut, Another at Shoalhaven in NSW and there are two large sites in the UK power grid Dinorwig and Cruachan, both of which supply near-instantaneous (<20sec) power against demand shifts. Compared to gas turbine load start (minutes), pumped hydro is fast (seconds). Compared to batteries (milliseconds), It's slow. Batteries have capacity limits too. In the capacity stakes, Pumped hydro can beat them hands-down but for a massive initial capital outlay. Snowy 2.0 will supply DAYS of power. 2Gigawatts, as 350GWh of power. 3 million homes equivalent, for a week. People argue about the economics, not about the underlying capability. Worldwide there are plenty of good sites, including mine shafts. And, gravity models for power include trains, and cranes. Neither of which will replace all sources of power for all burdens in the network either. The idea this is limited to existing land-surface bodies of water simply isn't true. Not all useful things have to be able to solve the problems "at the scale we need" to be both useful, and able to solve problems.
- labster 3y agoTypical university press release: this technology can revolutionize our energy grid by storing energy in a building’s foundation, because we powered an LED with some tiny cells we made.
- dmvdoug 3y agoI thought the same thing, so I went and looked at the paper, and unfortunately, the paper itself has some of these kind of speculative claims as well.
- ipsum2 3y agoUnpopular opinion, most of MIT's research claims are preposterous and can be safely ignored. Their undergraduate education is quite good, but the research output is quite shoddy. The only exception is their computational photography group (Fredo Durand) is pretty legit.
- sashank_1509 3y agoNo their research is much better than most. In my field of Robotics, Russ Tedrake, Alberto Rodriguez regularly get out impactful work (and I have a disdain for most work especially the kind Google does). I think they kind of lost out in Deep Learning to Berkeley and Stanford but they’re slowly building their expertise in it (frankly most of Academia doesn’t compare to industry outputs in Deep Learning so I don’t think it’s that big a deal)
- ipsum2 3y agoI agree that Russ Tedrake is great, I've watched his online lectures on underactuated robotics.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago> No their research is much better than most. Yeah, so good they were extensively faking their research and demos for a "personal food computer"...and even selling the fucking things to unsuspecting schools. Literally snake oil scamming. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+media+lab+grow+box+scam https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+med... Then there's your robotics team, backed by millions of dollars in free products and "consulting" (ie doing work for them) in sponsorship by defense contractors...beaten by a bunch of high school kids who raided a BoatUSA store and Home Depot to build an underwater robot with bilge pumps and a bunch of PVC pipe. The most exciting thing to come out of MIT Media Lab in two decades is an alarm clock wrapped in carpet that rolls off your nightstand when it goes off. MIT is a defense industry thinktank masquerading as a university.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- wumms 3y ago> The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household. Edit: 10kwh/3.5³m³ ≈ 0.233 Wh/l > Besides its ability to store energy in the form of supercapacitors, the same kind of concrete mixture can be used as a heating system, by simply applying electricity to the carbon-laced concrete.
- brtkdotse 3y ago> 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household. Excluding heating.
- ozim 3y agoI would be happy if I have it as a backup power source so I could wear warm clothes make myself hot coffee in electric kettle and wait for grid to be back online.
- keepamovin 3y agoHarnessing the entropic properties of bulk matter, easily ending up with molecular self assembly, without the need for micromanaging the process--genius! The team calculated that a block of nanocarbon-black-doped concrete that is 45 cubic meters (or yards) in size — equivalent to a cube about 3.5 meters across — would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household. Since the concrete would retain its strength, a house with a foundation made of this material could store a day’s worth of energy produced by solar panels or windmills and allow it to be used whenever it’s needed. And, supercapacitors can be charged and discharged much more rapidly than batteries. What I'm wondering is how to create a lightning battery with this? Unless my math is wrong (probably is) 1 lightning strike is 1 zeus = 1 billion joules = 300 kwh. 1 big-cube = 45m^3 = 10 kwh density = 10/45 kwh/m^3 volume needed to bottle lightning = 300kwh * 45/10m^3/kwh = 1350m^3 cube of sides 12m. or sphere of diameter 14m So, what I'm proposing is, we get a 60m high copper pole, stick it in a 14m diameter sphere of this, and put it in a rainstorm. Bottle of lightning?
- Tade0 3y agoLighting rods are actually there to discharge without lighting. In any case 10kWh worth of li-ion batteries is about the size of a water cooler tank, so the whole system - bms, inverter and all - is no larger than a water cooler.
- keepamovin 3y agoJust a heads up, Chrome flags your HN profile homepage as a "Deceptive site" !!
- tambourine_man 3y agoSo does Safari
- Tade0 3y agoThanks. Yeah, my fault - I was hosting a WIP Wordpress site for a client on a subdomain and forgot to set a strong password there. A week later there were already ChatGPT-generated posts in English, German and Russian. Well, at least the client got a demonstration regarding the consequences of having weak passwords. I've filled the form you gotta fill in such situations, but I'm not hopeful I'll ever get this domain back. Shame, because this started out as CV padding but over time evolved into this one place I link people to for quick solutions to stuff.
- harvie 3y agoThere is usualy steel reinforcement (rebar) in the concrete. Isn't introducing electrical current gonna cause galvanic corrosion of the rebar? Might even affect concrete structures around the capacitor, not just the capacitor itself. Also if i understood correctly, this capacitor would need to be kept wet (with water) to remain operational right? Wet basement is extremely annoying thing with many unpleasant consequences to say the least. So this might require some efforts to maintain the moisture while keeping it contained. How do you replace this thing? Eg. once cracks inevitably form in concrete, or when the carbon structure get damaged by accidental overvoltage/overcurrent, or when the insulation layers deteriorate. You cannot simply replace foundation of a building. Therefore it would make sense to keep the capacitor at least partialy separated from the structural parts of the building. Anyway this seems as an interresting idea and i wonder if plastic bucket full of concrete would be enough to power something like UPS to provide 100W to keep PC running for 15 minutes. Might as well stop replacing lead acid batteries every other year if this is at least remotely viable.
- jaclaz 3y agoIf it's not the galvanic effect, it would be more direct corrosion as the block will be "soaked in a standard electrolyte material, such as potassium chloride". And - given that the concrete will be poured "normally" - the reproducibility of these "power foundations" is likely to be low (and as you say there is no easy wayback). Besides, concrete is not just water and cement, the various sized aggregates (sand, gravel, finer aggregates) are what make it actually "concrete", the "grain" of concrete used in construction is very different from pure cement+water (and 3% carbon) mix, the samples they made (1 mm thick) won't likely scale up.
- WJW 3y agoWhile I love the ingenuity of this system, I have some trouble seeing it used as an economically viable energy storage option. According to the article, they would need about 45 m3 to store 10 kwh. At a concrete price of 200-300 $/m3, that would come to 9-13.5k USD just for the concrete. That's omitting any costs for the carbon black electrolyte, material processing, electrolyte separators and other things, so a very optimistic estimate. Meanwhile, battery prices have fallen so much that you can buy 10 kwh of Li-Ion batteries for about $1500 ($150/kwh 2021 prices). The saving grace might be to have it do double duty as a structural element in the building, but many other posters have pointed out that there are many safety and construction problems that would have to be solved for that first.
- AstralStorm 3y agoIt might also turn out that lime for the concrete will become a rate limiting material. Not to mention the energy cost involved in mining both it and creating the carbon nanopowder. But, a material with similar hydration properties to concrete, a biopolymer for instance, might exist and be made with less cost... We actually have to start thinking about replacing concrete with something else to be more energy efficient and sustainable.
- obiknows 3y agohempcrete obviously...
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- leblancfg 3y agoRaw concrete price in USA is closer to 150$/m3, often less. One thing we don’t know is life expectancy vs Li-ion, whose 10-year charge is ~60%. I haven’t read the paper; one thing that’ll also be interesting is operating temperatures. This could be a massive upside to concrete supercaps in certain parts of the globe.
- slow_typist 3y agoFor 2 m^3 of the material you will need around 1 metric ton of cement. You need around 2.8 GJ to produce 1 t of cement. Therefore you need 63 GJ or 17500 kWh to produce a capacitor of 45 m^3 that can hold 10 kWh. (Omitting the 3% carbon in the mixture obv.) I hope the thing is really resistant and cycles forever without degradation. BTW cement production contributes substantial amounts to global carbon emissions.
- jszymborski 3y agoIn fairness, I think the idea is that you would create this from concrete structures that would be built regardless and used in other ways. Adding extra capacity to the grid for "free" would good. Of course, this is a press release and they usually consist entirely of breathless exaggerations and wilful omissions of limitations.
- slow_typist 3y agoPoint taken, but we need to reduce cement usage anyway.
- pengaru 3y agoIs your math accounting for the volume the added water occupies? The paper describes using excess water for deliberately creating voids the electrolyte can access. AIUI when mixing cement any excess water in the initial mix weakens the cured product by leaving voids behind. You end up with a less dense cured result. Usually when you mix cement it's a balancing act of using as little water as possible while maintaining workability and still having sufficient water to kick off the process. Then once it sets up you go crazy with the water keeping it hydrated while it cures. This stuff is deliberately being mixed very wet...
- slow_typist 3y agoAdmitted, it could be less cement. But then the material could not be used for structural parts of a building.
- ajuc 3y agoAren't all capacitors energy-storing?
- bilsbie 3y agoThis is neat. Every house could have its own energy storage built into its foundation. How coool is that. Maybe dams could store excess energy in their structure.
- ilyt 3y agoReplacing it wouldn't be great tho...
- BizarroLand 3y agoHow often do you replace the foundation of your home? Worst case, the battery function drops to unusable levels and then you just have a plain old house foundation.
- rini17 3y agoAnyone interested in reproducing it? I presume supercapacitor needs to alternate thin layers of electrode/the cement mix/insulator, not just pour the bulk? It then makes more sense to prefabricate bricks/panels and connect them when laying.
- riformareov 3y agoThe idea of utilizing materials like water and gelatin to create supercapacitors that can potentially outperform conventional energy storage methods is a testament to human creativity and adaptability.