MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
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)
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+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.
Russ’s student Scott later went on to make Atlas (Boston Dynamics Humanoid) backflip. They were the first to come up with a backflipping quadruped. Alberto’s team won the Amazon pick and place challenge (also demonstrated a robot playing Jenga). Recently Pulkit showed how to rotate any arbitrary object with a dexterous robotic arm. I’d honestly find it hard to name universities better than MITs at robotics
What human being would even be qualified to judge the research output of a large research university across all fields? A research university is an umbrella under which hundreds of independent teams perform research. You can do journal metrics, but those have a long latency, you are measuring performance 2 to 10 years in the past, and such metrics are not without bias.
of q^2/2C
The first sustained artificial nuclear reaction [1] managed to produce...half a watt. I'm glad they weren't overly cynical about future possibilities.
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
Bottle of lightning?
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.
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.
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.
Of course, this is a press release and they usually consist entirely of breathless exaggerations and wilful omissions of limitations.
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...
But it's unclear to me how you'd get enough electrical capacity in such mixed applications since concrete is mostly aggregate (rock, gravel, sand), not cement, by volume.
I think those areas of the MIT press release are just fantasy.
Of course, no papers need to be published ... that may be the goal.
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.
Imagine a giant empty bucket held high in the air. As it rains, the bucket fills and using a counter-weight it slowly lowers down to ground level. Now the bucket is covered and the water is slowly drained causing the counter-weight to lower to the ground and the bucket to rise in the air again.
If this were geared properly, could energy be generated in any meaningful amount?
Highest rainfall in a year:
> 26,470 mm (1,042 in); Cherrapunji, Meghalaya, India, 1860–1861
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records
26.4 tons * 1km * 9.8m/s/s / 1 year = 7.4 watts
Many people have done the math.
People in general demand quick, simple, easy and singular solutions to complex problems that cover massive ranges of financial, geographical, political, cultural, and individual variances with no tolerance, and they honestly believe they are being fair and reasonable when they do so.
Example:
Idea: "New houses could have cheap batteries built into their foundations, cheaply decreasing the load on the electrical grid and providing a backup source to cover temporary power outages."
Response: "Well, that's not going to completely solve the energy crisis, restore CO2 to pre-industrial revolution levels and avert the polar ice caps from melting, so what's the point?"
And they think that this response is rational.
I think the more popular approach is to use a deep hole, like a mine shaft. Maybe depth measured in kms. Because you're suspending from above you might be able to get a bit heavier than 60 tons.
California is one potential location, and there's been a lot of interest in pumped hydro from the California Department of Energy (and utilities), but I doubt it'd work as well nationwide.
Checking their site, I see they currently have a 100MWh storage under construction in china, with a different, boxy-building design. No idea on costs. https://www.energyvault.com/project-cn-rudong
Good enough is good enough. There is no one size fits all, and we really need to start leveraging everything we can to tackle energy storage. Each thing used doesn't need to be perfect for energy density, it just has to be good enough.
> assume you build a tower 120 meters tall.
vs sticking a concrete block in the ground like this paper is proposing.
As long as the durability is there, and it scales up like they say, this concrete block thing has interesting practical potential, because concrete is so ubiquitous. It's in foundations, it's in walls, it's in floors, it's under the road, sidewalk etc.
Heck, where I live we could turn our whole street in to one big battery to service the neighbourhood, while we couldn't possibly stick a whopping great big tower with concrete blocks in it, or a suitable size water tower.
I have seen a few 120m towers. They call them skyscrappers.
Anyway, all this for 20Kwh. I can get a Nissan Leaf with a 40/60Kwh battery for way less than a skyscrapper. Most likely for way less than what it costs to make a 120m deep hole.
Long story short: cranes and concrete don't make a practical battery, but they make for many articles and publications.
Before you say "but lithium is hard to find, and concrete isn't": you can also make lead batteries, and ni/cd batteries, and liquid air batteries too. I don't expect the Earth to run out of air in the next decades.
Static concrete being able to store power like a battery, like the article is talking about, is ideal if it works (possibly with caveats depending on how quickly it degrades). It's a ubiquitous material, used all over the place. It'd be getting value out of something that is going to be used anyway.
Anything heavy can be used as a gravity battery. Water in hydro pump for example. Or lead, or concrete. Lead is not that cheap, concrete is not that effective. For water we usually have already constructed a dam, it's just a case of adding another pipe and a pump.
But I guarantee you that if we were to construct a dam, pipe and pump just for energy storage - instead of taking an already existing dam we built for another reason, it would also not be as good as a bunch of batteries in pretty much all relevant factors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A potential downside is the predominant production methods for cement aren't great for the climate.
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).
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.
Excluding heating.
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.
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.
Maybe dams could store excess energy in their structure.
Worst case, the battery function drops to unusable levels and then you just have a plain old house foundation.