Essay by Eric Worrall
If every house were to implement this energy storage “solution”, a single dielectric failure could lead to a sizeable chain reaction, as adjacent houses suffered mechanical shock and failure.
MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials
Made of cement, carbon black, and water, the device could provide cheap and scalable energy storage for renewable energy sources.
David L. Chandler | MIT News
Publication Date: July 31, 2023Two of humanity’s most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for a novel, low-cost energy storage system, according to a new study. The technology could facilitate the use of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal power by allowing energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations in renewable energy supply.
The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.
The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
Capacitors are in principle very simple devices, consisting of two electrically conductive plates immersed in an electrolyte and separated by a membrane. When a voltage is applied across the capacitor, positively charged ions from the electrolyte accumulate on the negatively charged plate, while the positively charged plate accumulates negatively charged ions. Since the membrane in between the plates blocks charged ions from migrating across, this separation of charges creates an electric field between the plates, and the capacitor becomes charged. The two plates can maintain this pair of charges for a long time and then deliver them very quickly when needed. Supercapacitors are simply capacitors that can store exceptionally large charges.
The amount of power a capacitor can store depends on the total surface area of its conductive plates. The key to the new supercapacitors developed by this team comes from a method of producing a cement-based material with an extremely high internal surface area due to a dense, interconnected network of conductive material within its bulk volume. The researchers achieved this by introducing carbon black — which is highly conductive — into a concrete mixture along with cement powder and water, and letting it cure. The water naturally forms a branching network of openings within the structure as it reacts with cement, and the carbon migrates into these spaces to make wire-like structures within the hardened cement. These structures have a fractal-like structure, with larger branches sprouting smaller branches, and those sprouting even smaller branchlets, and so on, ending up with an extremely large surface area within the confines of a relatively small volume. The material is then soaked in a standard electrolyte material, such as potassium chloride, a kind of salt, which provides the charged particles that accumulate on the carbon structures. Two electrodes made of this material, separated by a thin space or an insulating layer, form a very powerful supercapacitor, the researchers found.
The two plates of the capacitor function just like the two poles of a rechargeable battery of equivalent voltage: When connected to a source of electricity, as with a battery, energy gets stored in the plates, and then when connected to a load, the electrical current flows back out to provide power.
“The material is fascinating,” Masic says, “because you have the most-used manmade material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material — the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it. You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting.”
As the mixture sets and cures, he says, “The water is systematically consumed through cement hydration reactions, and this hydration fundamentally affects nanoparticles of carbon because they are hydrophobic (water repelling).” As the mixture evolves, “the carbon black is self-assembling into a connected conductive wire,” he says. The process is easily reproducible, with materials that are inexpensive and readily available anywhere in the world. And the amount of carbon needed is very small — as little as 3 percent by volume of the mix — to achieve a percolated carbon network, Masic says.
Supercapacitors made of this material have great potential to aid in the world’s transition to renewable energy, Ulm says. The principal sources of emissions-free energy, wind, solar, and tidal power, all produce their output at variable times that often do not correspond to the peaks in electricity usage, so ways of storing that power are essential. “There is a huge need for big energy storage,” he says, and existing batteries are too expensive and mostly rely on materials such as lithium, whose supply is limited, so cheaper alternatives are badly needed. “That’s where our technology is extremely promising, because cement is ubiquitous,” Ulm says.
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.
After a series of tests used to determine the most effective ratios of cement, carbon black, and water, the team demonstrated the process by making small supercapacitors, about the size of some button-cell batteries, about 1 centimeter across and 1 millimeter thick, that could each be charged to 1 volt, comparable to a 1-volt battery. They then connected three of these to demonstrate their ability to light up a 3-volt light-emitting diode (LED). Having proved the principle, they now plan to build a series of larger versions, starting with ones about the size of a typical 12-volt car battery, then working up to a 45-cubic-meter version to demonstrate its ability to store a house-worth of power.
There is a tradeoff between the storage capacity of the material and its structural strength, they found. By adding more carbon black, the resulting supercapacitor can store more energy, but the concrete is slightly weaker, and 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, they found.
Another potential application for carbon-cement supercapacitors is for building concrete roadways that could store energy produced by solar panels alongside the road and then deliver that energy to electric vehicles traveling along the road using the same kind of technology used for wirelessly rechargeable phones. A related type of car-recharging system is already being developed by companies in Germany and the Netherlands, but using standard batteries for storage.
Initial uses of the technology might be for isolated homes or buildings or shelters far from grid power, which could be powered by solar panels attached to the cement supercapacitors, the researchers say.
Ulm says that the system is very scalable, as the energy-storage capacity is a direct function of the volume of the electrodes. “You can go from 1-millimeter-thick electrodes to 1-meter-thick electrodes, and by doing so basically you can scale the energy storage capacity from lighting an LED for a few seconds, to powering a whole house,” he says.
Depending on the properties desired for a given application, the system could be tuned by adjusting the mixture. For a vehicle-charging road, very fast charging and discharging rates would be needed, while for powering a home “you have the whole day to charge it up,” so slower-charging material could be used, Ulm says.
“So, it’s really a multifunctional material,” he adds. 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.
Ulm sees this as “a new way of looking toward the future of concrete as part of the energy transition.”
The research team also included postdocs Nicolas Chanut and Damian Stefaniuk at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, James Weaver at the Wyss Institute, and Yunguang Zhu in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The work was supported by the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, with sponsorship by the Concrete Advancement Foundation.
Read More: https://news.mit.edu/2023/mit-engineers-create-supercapacitor-ancient-materials-0731
The idea is brilliant – using concrete to self assemble a matrix which can be used for a supercapacitor, out of cheap materials, is pure genius.
My concern is the application.
When capacitors fail they go with a bang. Old style televisions were notorious for this kind of failure, the loud bang which preceded the magic smoke was usually caused by capacitors suffering catastrophic dielectric failure, and releasing all their stored energy in a fraction of a second.
What concerns me is, if a TV capacitor explodes, abruptly releasing a few joules of energy, you spill your beer and curse a bit. But if a 10KWh household super capacitor goes, that’s 36 million joules of energy – equivalent to 8.6Kg of TNT, enough to turn your house into a sizeable crater.
10KW (10,000 watt hours) x 3600 seconds in an hour = 36,000,000 joules of energy
36,000,000 joules / 4,184 joules / gram = 8,604g = 8.6Kg of TNT
Even more interesting, brittle materials like concrete are vulnerable to mechanical shock. So that 8.6Kg of TNT equivalent, enough to utterly destroy a normal house, could trigger a chain reaction of adjacent dielectric failures, resulting in thousands or even millions of houses abruptly releasing their stored energy. And that’s not even considering the energy storage requirements of even greater concentrations of energy, like high-rise apartments and office buildings.
The failure of 115 adjacent household storage super capacitors holding 10KWh could release a kiloton of force – think the Beirut explosion in 2020.
Worse, each additional household energy storage system recruited into the chain reaction and explosion would increase the risk to the next house.
I’m thinking, that would not be a good day to visit town.
Of course, all this risk could be mitigated by using expensive spring or rubber loaded mounts and shock resistant supports, to minimise the risk of the house foundation capacitor detonating because of an adjacent explosion. I’m sure no building contractor would be tempted to cut corners and use cheap, substandard shock protection components, right?
So great idea guys, but please find another proposed use for your brilliant idea which doesn’t involve a small but non-zero risk of a nuclear scale explosion in a builtup area.
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Many fine technical descriptions of what can go wrong with this ridiculous idea in the comments today. Having been an electrical engineer before I retired, I will only add that besides the dangers described, capacitors are not perfect storage devices. The smallest fault in the construction will cause them to leak off their charge rendering them useless for this purpose. Capacitors are generally used for very short time frame storage, not much more than milliseconds, such as phase shifting, AC ripple smoothing, motor start etc. Long term, not practical due to leakage. Besides, the usual building construction methods are not noted for microinch tolerances, necessary in a quality capacitor. When they say their technology is scalable, they are WAGing it, not even SWAGing.
Charging cars from the road.
They will be lucky if they manage to get 1% efficiency from that.
Actually I would be a lot more worried about people/animals getting zapped from short circuits due to rain, oil slicks etc. Road surface charge storage is utterly insane.
This article demonstrates the danger of letting social scientists try to do real science.
The capacitance of a capacitor is determined by 3 factors.
1) The surface area of each plate of the capacitor.
2) The permeability of the dielectric.
3) The average distance between the plates.
While it may be possible for concrete to serve as a dielectric, I doubt it is a good one.
By the very nature of the beast, the two plates are going to average probably 6 to 9 inches apart. (To keep that in perspective, most commercial capacitors try to keep that distance to less than a millimeter.)
Beyond that, where did these morons get the idea that there are air gaps in the concrete just waiting for carbon fiber to fill them? If you have ever watched someone laying concrete, one of the things they do is vibrate the mix in an effort to force all of the bubbles out. Air gaps mean weakness.
As to soaking the concrete in any form of salt. That’s a good way to rapidly decrease the concretes life expectancy.
The idea that such a structure is going to provide more than a few micro-farads per square meter is ludicrous.
Huge cost, decreased performance, no noticeable gain. Socialism in action.
I have an idea for using nitroglycerine as an electrolyte in a hypercapacitor. Would anyone be interested in getting in on a ground floor investment? I can assure you that your investment will explode over a short time period.
Finally the argument over licencing of academic engineers has no simple answer. At WSU (Mfg. Eng) and UW (Mech. Eng) I was the only engineer with a P.E. for a long time which is why I was assigned to senior design duties. I was an adjunct in Civil (UW), but never canvassed the department to learn who had a P.E. and who didn’t. At MIT even the ABET certification varies by department.
Academic engineers can be sufficiently narrow to not understand many design issues. Just sayin’.
as part of the paris accords, make a new UN building using this. And any government that pushes it, make their office buildings out of it
45 cubic metres for 10kWh? Pathetic. The Finns claim to manage 8MWh in 100 tonnes of sand:
https://polarnightenergy.fi/technology
I have to disagree with the destructive potential of this kind of capacitor, at least one with the energy density they project. Your calculation of 10 kW-hr = 8.6 kg TNT is correct, no question about that. But recall that this would be the energy stored in 45 cubic meters of concrete, a material whose density is about 2,400 kg/m^3. The specific energy of the entire mass would then be 36,000,000 J/108,000,000 g concrete = 1/3 J/g. The specific heat capacity of concrete is 0.88 J/g-degree C, so at worst the concrete would heat up by 0.38 degrees C. I don’t think that could lead to catastrophe.