MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from cement, water, and carbon black
MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from cement, water, and carbon black
news.mit.edu
MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials
MIT engineers created a carbon-cement supercapacitor that can store large amounts of energy. Made of just cement, water, and carbon black, the device could form the basis for inexpensive systems that store intermittently renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy.
The original paper says you'd need 45 cubic meters of this stuff to store the daily energy for one house, which is about 60 yards of concrete. But even a relatively thick 5" pad that's 1500 square feet only has 23 yards of concrete in it.
So they'd have to improve the energy density by 3x before this is commercially viable.
Yeah, but you can use it for demand smoothing: store the collected solar during the day and use that at night.
If you’re gonna use concrete anyway, this is definitely more useful. But if you’re going to use it as your only battery you’re better off with other technologies.
That's a rather high threshold for "commercial viability." You can't power a house with alkaline batteries but they're still commercially viable.
Depending on your country, many places don't use wood for the structure.
Higher energy density is going to be needed for sure, but as a brutalism evangelist, I'm gonna take this chance to say we could just make the whole building out of concrete so it's all one big battery.
As a solarpunk evangelist, put these at the bottom of canals that are covered with solar panels, so they can store their own energy.
"the load-bearing cement-based matrix" makes it sound like it could be used structurally. Foundation and concrete block frame. Sounds like the buildings could be the energy storaga themselved along with the footing of windmills. Am I getting this wrong?