New Material Can Store Vast Amounts of Energy 253
ElectricSteve writes "Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as 'the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,' the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors."
Re:Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
On the face of it, yes, but the problem is that they've said the material is compact. Whether they can make compact batteries and compact, cheap battery chargers is another question entirely. I doubt they can, considering the pressures involved to make the material.
So, how do one extract the energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
They can store, but how do one extract the energy ?
Re:Batteries go BOOOOOOOOM! (Score:5, Insightful)
- Energy storage for renewable to allow baseline operation
- Car fuel that only needs to be refilled monthly
- Backup generators that don't require huge fuel tanks
You never want to start small with new technology. Remember the problem with exploding Nokia's? I would not let a higher energy density version near my head until it's been tested in practice for years, no need to nuke my own head off...
Proof Of The Science News Cycle! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahaha.. this so reminds me of this [phdcomics.com].
Folks, what they've done is make Xenon Octa-fluoride, which is an order of magnitude harder than the previously created Xenon Tera-fluoride.
As cool as it is that some chemists have managed to make a new compound that had only been theorized before, it's not enough for the drooling media. So they try to explain why it is remotely relevant and interesting, and the media replies with this sort of gross stupidity.
Science reporting at its finest.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
XeF2 - are they crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
XeF2 produces _atomic_ fluorine during decomposition. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.
Re:the most condensed form of energy ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
This will be awesome for mobile devices, if they can make it cheap and compact enough.
Unless it weights 1kg/cm3
Re:Proof Of The Science News Cycle! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proof Of The Science News Cycle! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but phdcomics missed one important step in the science news cycle: where the researcher himself wracks his brain to come up with some speculative practical application to justify his next grant.
Ideally, every grant should have a section, "How this discovery will help the war against terror (if we get more money)."
Back in the cold war, every grant had a section, "How this discovery will help the war against Communism (if we get more money)."
Then comes the section, "How this discovery will help the war against cancer (if we get more money)."
Since the investigator is supposed to review every press release for accuracy, phdcomics can't blame the university PR office too much.
Not that I have any objection. I'd rather see money spent on useless basic science than on war.
Re:Extreme (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking, how much energy is needed to create this material ? Because if you need 1000000x the energy to store a little it's probably not as useful.
The pressure is used in a plant to create the material, the safety very much depends on how they apply that pressure. Also you could put it in the desert somewhere if that would make you feel safe.
Re:Extreme (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it can still be very useful. The advantage of a battery is not only that it can store energy, but also makes it transportable. This would be very useful to move an energy source to a location where power generation is not (easily) possible.
Consider how solar cells, even though they might cost more energy to make than they will ever supply during their lifetime are still very useful powering a communication satellite. In the same way, this material might be interesting to send to outer space, or as power supply in other very remote locations.
Re:Don't read too much into this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that if the alternating layers have opposite charges, those charges set up an electric field, which will pull electrons from one side to another, and the charges cancel. There doesn't need to be a "connection", the electrons will cross the space between the layers anyway.
If you place an insulator between the layers, then you've just invented a garden variety capacitor, but the problem remains: with sufficient charge, the electric field between the layers will exceed the breakdown voltage of the insulator, which will then conduct and short out the layers.
The breakdown voltage is closely related to, you guessed it, the chemical bond strength of the insulator. It's not a coincidence that the best insulators tend to be strongly bonded covalent substances like ceramics and oxides.
We've just about hit the wall on insulators, most capacitor development has been about making the conductive layers thinner. Only the outermost layers of conductive atoms store the charge, everything else is just redundant, so getting rid of as much conductor as possible gives better capacity per unit volume.
The concrete example is no good either. It's much the same scenario as the compressed matter in the article. In the case of reinforced concrete, the steel is providing compression, but you'll find that the total energy stored is not very high per unit mass of steel. If you try to increase the energy stored with greater tension in the steel, it'll break at some point, which is determined by... the chemical bond strength of the metal.
Re:Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
Dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Dunno... If you need 1000000x the energy, but the result can be detonated and actually release more energy per kilo than a nuke (and a cloud of atomic fluoride is just icing on the cake too), the military would drool all over it. In fact, someone probably already came in his pants reading this news.
To put it into perspective, the Manhattan Project has cost the equivalent of 20 billion 1996 dollars. (Or about 30 billion in todays dollars.) The power used by the Oak Ridge facility alone to separate the uranium that went into one of the bombs (the other was plutonium) used 10% of the total electricity produced in the USA at the time.
Compared to the modest yield of the first nukes, they genuinely pumped orders of magnitude more energy in, than they got out.
Re:Extreme (Score:3, Insightful)
and the excess heat can be used to heat water to run turbines, and collect some of the energy pack :) Still inefficient, but does collect some of the waste back into use.
Re:Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's quite impossible to have compounds that are stable enough to store energy but, with a little incentive, will release it. Such compounds, fancifully called "fuel" have been demonstrated to be against the laws of physics.
The article isn't clear about what exactly goes on, but it does suggest that the mechanical energy used to compress the stuff is converted into chemical energy held in the bonds. It's possible that those bonds remain somewhat stable at normal pressure. In that case you could probably break those bonds by providing a bit of energy of your own. Just like with gasoline - it's mostly stable until you provide a bit of energy (a match, say), and then the stored energy is released.
Nice explosive (Score:1, Insightful)
his would be very useful to move an energy source to a location where power generation is not (easily) possible.
Notice that no one discussed the efficiency of the energy storage occurring here. It seems that while the ratio of energy to mass is extraordinarily high the process is very inefficient. The amount stored being a small fraction of the energy used to achieve it. This will probably wind up being used as an explosive.