Concrete supercapacitor

[Micael]

With superconductors in the new, now an interesting supercapacitor concept also join them.

MIT researchers turned concrete into an energy-storing supercapacitor with one cheap additive

By Joshua Hawkins
Published Aug 11th, 2023 7:34PM EDT
MIT concrete supercapacitor
Image: Kler / Adobe
What if you could turn concrete into a viable and effective energy storage option? While that might seem a bit out-of-this-world, that’s exactly what MIT researchers have managed to do, according to reports from New Atlas. A paper on the new concrete supercapacitor is also available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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According to this research, MIT researchers were able to take an idea from 2021 – which said that you could store useful amounts of energy in concrete – and scale it up effectively by simply adding a single additive to the concrete mix. The mixture thus became a combination of concrete, water, and carbon black.

When combined, the three components allowed the researchers to create an energy-storing concrete supercapacitor that was easy to scale up, with it only requiring a change from “1-millimeter-thick electrodes to 1-meter-thick electrodes” to go from powering simple things like LED lights to full-blown buildings and homes.

solar panels that work in the dark
Solar panels could one day be connected to concrete supercapacitors to collect energy throughout the day. Image source: zhengzaishanchu / Adobe
Further, because many homes are already built on concrete foundations, it’s a system that should be able to easily scale up and at the least negate some of the cost of the power consumption that homeowners are already undertaking through normal electricity bills.

It’s an intriguing idea and one that bodes well for the future of building and architecture, especially given that the researchers say a 1,589-cu-ft block of the concrete supercapacitor would be capable of storing up to 10kWh of electricity, roughly a third of the energy needed to power a home.

From there, it could also be paired with next-generation solar panels, and since concrete is available everywhere, it wouldn’t be hard to incorporate it more widely. However, it’s unclear at the moment just how effective this type of concrete would be outside, where it could get wet, so the experiment certainly requires some more thought and testing before widespread use.

[Belushi TD]

1589 cubic foot block? That's about 59 cubic yards. Six standard concrete trucks. And that's for 1/3 the power needed for a home. Admittedly, you'd not use the capacitor all the time.

Unless they're planning on turning the foundation and concrete driveway into a capacitor, I'm not sure how the hell they would do that.

They're going to need to work on getting the energy density up.

Belushi TD

[Pdf27]

Worth noting that electricity usage varies a lot - I use about 5 kWh/day for a 1000 sq ft ranch, of which 1-2kWh is in the hours of darkness. An insulated slab for this would be 4" thick => ~330 cu ft or 12 cubic yards - and provide about 2 kWh of battery storage. If you can use more or less conventional rebar as electrodes, a cheap additive and there isn't an impact on strength or durability it looks very interesting.

[Micael]

1589 cubic foot block? That's about 59 cubic yards. Six standard concrete trucks. And that's for 1/3 the power needed for a home. Admittedly, you'd not use the capacitor all the time.

Unless they're planning on turning the foundation and concrete driveway into a capacitor, I'm not sure how the hell they would do that.

They're going to need to work on getting the energy density up.

Belushi TD

I think that’s exactly what they’re planning on, using the foundations and such. Though I could see a fair few problems with that. What’s the longevity like? Not like you can swap out the foundations to your house easily if the old one starts to fail as a capacitor? Grounding issues? Does the foundation needs to be encapsulated in some other material? If so, what if a crack/leak appears?

[kdahm]

That's pretty much it. How are they planning on electrically isolating the concrete foundation? What's the effect of adding carbon black to the concrete on strength and workability? Durability? Will the proposed capacitor work when applying typical construction QC? For a capacitor, it needs to have portions which are at different electrical potential, meaning that steel rebar can't go between them.

Sounds like it's more of a 'well, it worked in the lab" invention.