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."
Batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
This will be awesome for mobile devices, if they can make it cheap and compact enough.
Energy density? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't read too much into this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to study batteries and capacitors and the like in relation to energy storage, and one interesting comment I heard once was that storage utilising only chemical or electromagnetic methods cannot store more energy in a given lump of matter than the energy contained in its chemical bonds, otherwise the stored energy exceeds the "binding strength" of the substance, and it's liable to either leak the energy, not accept any more, or even explode.
This is true of even things like Ultracapacitors or flywheel storage, both of which have similar issues with breakdown largely caused by limited bond strength, despite neither using chemical energy storage.
This kind of "high pressure storage" seems to break this rule if you consider only the compressed material itself as the storage medium. If you factor in the anvil generating those pressures, then you'll find that the total system is probably quite bad at energy storage per kg of matter. There's no escaping this.
The pressure they were using is over 100GPa (1 million atmospheres), which is notably higher than the highest tensile strength of carbon nanotubes ever measured! There's no chance in hell that a practical container could be made to contain a material at those pressures. First of all, it would have to be atomically perfect, and second, it would violently explode if it received the slightest damage!
What the article was saying is that some of the energy imparted by the compression was stored as chemical energy. This is all fine and good, but I guarantee that if the pressure is lowered, that energy is released, and none of it can be stored at normal pressures.
Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder, it takes pressures to make diamonds, but the resulting material is not under pressure. I think the correct term is under stress?
So the material might be made by using pressure, but the resulting product is not under pressure stress?
Re:So, how do one extract the energy? (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was a kid, one could throw a AA battery against the ground, real hard, and have a roughly 25% chance of it going bang, releasing all the energy at once. At least I assume that was what powered the small explosion. The cheap Chinese ones that sometimes came with toys had a much higher explosion rate. It was like getting free firecrackers with every battery powered toy.
Not what you had in mind though, I suspect.
My guess would be a chemical reaction that cracked the material into component materials, releasing energy in some form or another, heat or light being the most probable.
Re:Don't read too much into this... (Score:1, Interesting)
You fool, how can you even think of using conventional containment for an unconventional energy storage. You need a relativistic containment chamber utilizing a gravity well or black hole in the center of mass within the condensed entity. By regulating the tachyon flow from the emitter which is powered by residual expansion you can manually regulate the stability of the entity.
-Scotty
That is always the trickey part (Score:3, Interesting)
I think some folks forget that we already have some things with amazing energy densities out there. Semtex would be a good example. It is stable, moldable, and stores a whole lot of energy. However, the way it releases its energy is as an explosion, it is a plastic explosive. Well that makes it not so useful as a battery. For batteries, you want a slow release of energy, and you want that energy in an electrical form, of course. We have all kinds of substances with high energy densities, but that doesn't mean they are usefl as a battery. As the parent says, it matter how you can get the energy out.
Re:XeF2 - are they crazy? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's people playing with a lot nastier compounds out there...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
Dioxygen Difluoride is one of the more spectacular WTF, another "favorite" is chlorine trifluoride which is hypergolic with lots of things including ordinarily benign materials such as sand!
Re:The grail of energy storage... (Score:4, Interesting)
... AND if that energy can be reasonably released. Gasoline, for example, contains about 45 MJ / kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg) -- all you need is a 3 liter bottle of it on your desk. It'll be physically stable for a good long time. But you need a large, wasteful engine to release it.
Re:Extreme (Score:3, Interesting)
First thing I thought of was Heinlein's Shipstone. [blogspot.com] That too would blow up if anyone tried to disassemble it, ensuring the Shipstone Corporation a virtual monopoly on the assembly process, without the tedium of a patent.
Shipstone quote from Robert Heinlein's Friday (Score:4, Interesting)
-thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere-in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.
Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.
With the encouragement of his devoted wife Muriel (nee Greentree), who went back to work to keep food on the table, young Shipstone resigned from General Atomics and became the most American of myth-heroes, the basement inventor. Seven frustrating and weary years later he had fabricated the first Shipstone by hand. He had found-What he had found was a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker." What he had achieved was the utter destruction of the biggest industry (aside from organized religion) of the western world.
For what happened next I must draw from the muckraking history and from other independent sources as I just don't believe the sweetness and light of the company version. Fictionalized speech attributed to Muriel Shipstone:
"Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most. . . and no years at all in threefourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don't know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?"
"Certainly. If they don't know how I insert the-"
"Hush! I don't want to know. And walls have ears. We don't make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?"
The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don't own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it. Those billions of customers could bankrupt the Shipstone complex almost overnight by going back to their old ways-burn coal, burn wood, burn oil, burn uranium, distribute power through continent-wide stretches of copper and aluminum wires and/or long trains of coal cars and tank cars.
But no one, so far as my terminal could dig out, wants to go back to the bad old days when the landscape was disfigured in endless ways and the very air was loaded with stinks and carcinogens and soot, and the ignorant were scared silly by nuclear power, and all power was scarce and expensive. No, nobody wants the bad old ways-even the most radical of the complainers want cheap and convenient power. . . they just want the Shipstone companies to go away and get lost.
"The people's right to know"-the people's right to know what? Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone.
Any and all of "the people" are free to do as he did-he did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold.
In this case, the trouble with "the people's right to know" is that it strongly resembles the "right" of someone to be a concert pianist-but who does not want to practice.
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
Re:Extreme (Score:4, Interesting)
Even though solar panels make MANY TIMES more energy than it takes to build them, comparing input energy to delivered electricity is an apples-oranges comparison, for several reasons. Among them:
- Much of the energy needed to make the cells is raw heat (for things like melting the glass and metal that make up its housing). You'd be a fool to use solar electricity for smelting - paying a carnot cycle penalty.
- The job is delivering electricity in usable form to a particular location. The main competitor is the power grid. Power grids consume considerably more energy than they deliver, largely from carbon-emitting fossil fuel or nuclear reactions, on an ongoing basis. It's called "less than perfect efficiency". Solar panels consume only sunlight. Power grids also take energy - and other valueable stuff - to build: Energy to make the transformers, wire, insulators, poles, generators, boilers, switches, meters. Energy to clear a path and install them, take workers to and from the site. Trees to make poles. Land to be dedicated to power lines for lifetimes. I could go on.
There are many things of value involved in making solar power installations and power grids. Price is a good way of summarizing a basket of costs to human value. So as a first approximation when solar power is more affordable than grid power it's approximately less damaging to and consumptive of things people value.
As of about ten years ago Solar power was past cost break-even only for situations where the cost of a grid hookup was high: New construction in remote areas where the cost of running grid power was several grand, or small loads distant from a plug-in (road signs, emergency telephones, decorative yard lighting, ...) Recently, even without government subsidies, it has been approaching price break-even for sunny suburban locations.
Screwed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Extreme (Score:3, Interesting)
"You'd be a fool to use solar electricity for smelting"
Hi, we have this thing called electromagnetic induction. We can use solar as the source of required energy and we have used it for smelting ALL THE TIME.
Re:Useless for practical applications... (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
The only reason you're saying that is because we aren't currently facing an imminent extinction event that can be cured with a bit of metastable isotopic unobtainium. If Hollywierd has taught us anything, it's that nothing is impossible in the face of an imminent extinction event. It seems to be the only way to get those evil scientists to share their horded knowledge.
Re:Extreme (Score:3, Interesting)
it seems that the basic idea is things like levers to apply force and all that force is concentrated to the point of a diamond that is well, pointy, and very small. kinda along the lines of '3mph ain't bad when its a pillow to the face, but it really sucks when its the tip of a sword'
Re:Batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
So, in your world diamonds spontaneously become a pile of graphite?