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Power Science

Scientists Turn Normal Red Bricks into Electricity-Storing Supercapacitors (vice.com) 94

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
Bricks are about as basic as architectural materials can get, yet these simple building blocks have hidden powers that can be leveraged to provide electricity, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists modified a common red brick -- the same kind you'll find on sale for under a dollar at your local hardware store -- so that it could power a green LED light. This proof-of-concept for a "smart brick" reveals that brick technology, which dates back thousands of years, can be tweaked to have futuristic applications, including electrical conductivity and sensing capabilities. The results were published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. "We have created a new brick that can be incorporated into your house that has the functionality of storing electrical energy," said study co-author Julio D'Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, in a call. "We are thinking that sensing applications is a low-hanging fruit for these bricks," he added.
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Scientists Turn Normal Red Bricks into Electricity-Storing Supercapacitors More

Scientists Turn Normal Red Bricks into Electricity-Storing Supercapacitors

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  • Aaw just great (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:10PM (#60394401)

    Now we have IoT bricks...

    • Awesome, now you can track velocity, where it came from, where it ended up. Lots of interesting things to track. I bet someone will sell this data pretty soon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sycodon ( 149926 )

      Soon, they will be mandated.

      Then they won't sell of under a dollar at your local hardware store. More like $10 a brick

  • ... both suggest this is not the first time this was discovered.

  • Cue the flute.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) * on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:12PM (#60394411)

    And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away
    In the tidal destruction the moral melee
    The elastic retreat rings the close of play
    As the last wave uncovers the newfangled way
    But your new shoes are worn at the heels
    And your suntan does rapidly peel
    And your wise men don't know how it feels
    To be thick as a brick

  • Needs a brick joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:17PM (#60394423)

    Student: 503 bricks are on a plane. 1 falls off. How many are left?

    Teacher: 502.

    Student: How do you put an elephant in a fridge?

    Teacher:No you can’t fit an elephant in a fridge!!

    Student: Just open door, put elephant in, close door.

    Student: How do you put a giraffe in the fridge?

    Teacher: open door,put giraffe in, close door

    Student: no! Open door, take elephant out, put giraffe in, close door.

    Student: The Lion King is having a B-day party. All the animals are there, except one. Which one? Teacher: let me guess the lion?

    Student: No!The giraffe because He’s in a fridge.

    Teacher: WOW!

    Student: Sally has to get across a large river home to many alligators. They are very dangerous, but Sally swims across safely. How?

    Teacher: Sally stepped on the alligators mouth?

    Student:The gators are at the party.

    Student: But Sally dies anyway. Why?

    Teacher:She drowned?!

    Student: no! She got hit in the head by a flying brick.

  • I can say "yeah, but I'm a SMART brick head."

  • Self cleaning brick shithouse would be nice. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by javaman235 ( 461502 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:47PM (#60394545)

    Just set it in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or water, and with this it can provide motion sensors and light for users via solar, and Filter urine into water pure enough to clean with the same tech mentioned, even power automated cleaning system.

  • No discussion on how much energy each brick has: i.e. how long it (or a pair, since it looks like 2 bricks are soldered to run it) can run the green LED.

    Speaking of solder, in the picture it looks like 2 bricks are soldered together. Not many masons are using high power solder guns to join bricks. They'll have to come up with reasonably cheap, reasonably conductive solder. In practical terms ideally they'd come up with an additive fur regular mortar that fits these requirements.

    • With "brick" buildings all being brick facades these days, they already have metal clips every other course that holds the brick facade to the structure. Would be relatively easy/reasonable to come up with something you just lay on top of the course that 1) anchors the wall, and 2) provides the conductor.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        With "brick" buildings all being brick facades these days, they already have metal clips every other course that holds the brick facade to the structure. Would be relatively easy/reasonable to come up with something you just lay on top of the course that 1) anchors the wall, and 2) provides the conductor.

        Well, maybe. But the caveat is that the more current flowing through a low-quality, high-resistance contact point, the more heat it will generate, so getting a really solid, low-resistance bond is potentially important (unless you want the house to burn down). That's doubly true if the bricks are thermally coupled to studs or plywood. I'd imagine that if this ever gets popular in the real world, bricklayers will end up learning how to do blowtorch soldering.

        This, of course, assumes that this modification

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        The most important table cells on page 19 of https://static-content.springe... [springer.com] are empty, so it seems we do not get to know how much energy one brick is supposed to store.

      • With "brick" buildings all being brick facades these days,

        In America, not Europe and many other places.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      When the house is on fire where is the isolation switch for powered bricks before the fire fighters start hosing it down

  • And if it doesn't function any longer.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by delirious.net ( 595841 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:49PM (#60394551)
    it is bricked..

    Long story short:
    The post tells us how awesome it is, and new, but 2000y/o tech, yaddayadda, but not how.


    rtfa
    Brick has surface area inside
    Coated with some conductive poly

    Bottom line, it is not the brick, anything would do, it is the poly that does the work, as with batteries

    same old.

    it's a battery

    • rtfa
      Brick has surface area inside
      Coated with some conductive poly

      Bottom line, it is not the brick, anything would do, it is the poly that does the work, as with batteries

      Apparently, the reason why anything would NOT do, is that the polymer coating reacts with the iron oxide (which gives the brick its red color). But yeah, lots of not-detailed-enough text.

    • battery != capacitor

      A battery (or more correctly, an electrical cell) stores electrical energy in chemical form. Current is produced from chemical reactions within the cell that supply electrons to the cathode and receive them at the anode, via the circuit.

      A capacitor stores electrical energy in electrostatic form. Current is produced from electrons flowing from the capacitor plate with an excess of them, to the plate with a deficit of them, via the circuit.

      In either case, by convention, the current in the

    • It is the brick, it works more like a capacitor than a battery.

    • The headline and fiest sentence of the article:
      --
      Scientists Turn Normal Red Bricks into Electricity-Storing Supercapacitors
      "We have created a new brick
      --

      The first 5 words of the story basically say "the headline is bullshit".

  • Not a great way to store energy (Score:5, Informative)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @01:53PM (#60394567)

    At 222e-6watt hour/cm^2 one brick would be about 0.15 watt-hours of energy storage, whereas a similarly sized lithium ion battery would be about 300 to 600 watt-hours. That means you could have one lithium ion brick, or 4000 capacitor bricks. Which would be cheaper? you decide.

    • So as much power as a potato clock.

    • I would think of this breakthrough as being more helpful for cheap long term energy storage, not expensive high density energy storage.

      So, imagine you had an energy storage system that could store electrical power not only in the kinetic energy of the brick (from raising it against gravity) but also inside the brick.

      The fact they are made from relatively abundant resources also helps.

      • The problem is connecting that many bricks together, the copper and time and energy to connect many storage devices has it's own costs. At a very low energy density it probably wouldn't be worth it. Where that is I don't know, but I'd think 1 watt per liter (a brick is about a liter would be a good starting point. They'd need to get the brick to store about 10 times more energy to get to 1Watt a brick.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Capacitors are typically not what you want to use for long term storage.

    • When you need/want the bricks anyway, who cares?

    • So if you've got a house with say 20K bricks, that's 3KW-hours of storage. You need the bricks anyway, so why not? (ok, price, practicality, labour, etc---never mind).
    • Storage density doesn't really play into this, you are not looking to incorporate these into smartphones or cars. Besides these are supercaps not batteries, so apples and oranges really. Who knows what kind of commercial use cases this might have if any, still a neat idea that you could do it.

      • All I'm saying is they need to increase the storage density, it wouldn't be useful for a home at 0.15W/hrs a brick. A typical home pulls about 20 kW/day or about 1kW/hr. This means you'd need 50000 bricks to last 8hrs. The average home uses 8000 bricks.

        • It's a supercap not a battery, you don't use it as long term energy storage, if anything you use it for load smoothing.

  • are they "bricked"?

  • Thanks, Mr. Heinlein!

  • Lift the brick... lower the brick... (https://energyvault.com/)
    • heat the brick, cool the brick. Night storage heaters were full of bricks
      • Gravitational potential energy is easier to convert to/from electricity, and is also a long-duration storage solution.

        • True, but I did the math, and the block you need to lift for even a normal day of power usage, is *huge*. Like several houses huge, if I remember correctly...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          The heat capacity of a brick is much greater than any gravitational potential you're likely to be able to store in and harvest from it. Heat storage in bricks is actually practical, and widely used, whereas gravitational potential storage is a kickstarter scam.

      • so where blast furnaces. Well not the furnace, but the one in Birmingham (Sloss Steel?) had several towers full of bricks that they would heat up with the burning CO. They'd heat the towers, then blow the hot air into the furnace. Interesting that once they got the blast furnace going, the CO generated from the coal used to make the steel kept the thing going until they were done.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      https://www.google.com/url?sa=... [google.com]

      If only Kickstarters could do math as well as they do computer animation.

  • In what way, shape or form is the VERY puny charge held on these things in the supercapacitor category? They aren't. I could put thin layer of brick as dieletric between two sheets of tinfoil and do better.

  • Energy storage of a house (Score:3)

    by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @02:23PM (#60394717) Homepage

    So I found a "brick calculator" that said a house 30' x 40' x 10' of brick walls (skipping the windows and doors?) would be 933 cu. ft. of brick, or 26 cu.m.

    TFA links to a paper that contains the number "394Whcm3", round up to 400 mWh/L, and 400 Wh/cu.m. That's 2.5 cu.m. per kWh, which in turn is 5 tonnes per kWh!

    So, the house could store 26 X 0.4 = 10 kWh. Ish.

    I have to admit that Tesla might have to, in all fairness, hand them the trademark for "PowerWall" since it would be more appropriate for the actual walls.

    But frankly, I don't think Tesla is in any danger unless the overall system, with all the bricks connected electrically, is only a few thousand $ more than just slapping up a wall of ordinary bricks, because those Tesla products now hold over 10 kWh, for several thousand.

    There's likely a lot of value in this paper, but construction bricks themselves, may not be it. If it creates cheaper storage per kWh at ALL, then it has great value any place that nobody minds the storage being very heavy: maybe utility-scale storage with a pile of stone the size of minor pyramids.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rbrander ( 73222 )

      Argh. Sorry, characters didn't come through the cut/paste.

      The original paper says "394 microwatt-hours per cubic centimetre", and the Greek "mu" was lost. So, again, "394 milliwatt-hours per Litre" and "394 Wh per cubic metre", multiplying by a thousand, twice.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )

        Argh. Sorry, characters didn't come through the cut/paste.

        The original paper says "394 microwatt-hours per cubic centimetre", and the Greek "mu" was lost. So, again, "394 milliwatt-hours per Litre" and "394 Wh per cubic metre", multiplying by a thousand, twice.

        You are citing a number that is given on page 19 of https://static-content.springe... [springer.com] - but not for the new brick-capacitor, but for conventional super capacitors. The most important table cells on that page are empty.

    • It was only the first prototype.

      You wouldn't call cars no competition for the horse, upon seeing the first horseless carriage either.

      They do say they are optimizing it, [now that the proof of concept works].

      I still think it is stupid hype, because the brick is almost irrelevant to the solution.

  • this isn't new (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    powering a small LED using a brick is super easy. walk into a convenience store, hit the guy behind the counter in the head with a brick, and then steal a bunch of batteries.

  • Combine solar shingles, supercap bricks, and conductive bricks to form a house that generates its own electrical needs, storage, and that can provide the bus to distribute the gross electrical through the walls. You can probably even signal across the field and use it to distribute network connectivity on the same lines and may even have enough surface area to make use of airflow over surface of bricks to supplement to electrical generation. Embed some antennas and induction for wireless distribution of pow

  • More clickbait... (Score:5, Informative)

    by azcoyote ( 1101073 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @02:44PM (#60394791)
    Slashdot sure is good at misleading titles. First, it's not a "normal" red brick; it's a modified brick. How expensive is the modification? Clearly we're not dealing with a "technology, which dates back thousands of years" if you have to modify the thing with a high-tech polymer. Moreover, it isn't really the brick that matters, but the iron oxide that contributes to the red color of the brick. So it's really just that they've found a way to make use of trace amounts of iron oxide spread across a large amount of other matter with a porous shape. Secondly, what makes such a poor storage medium a "supercapacitor"? Is the threshold for "super" really that low? I suppose it has to do with how little energy is wasted between storage and retrieval, but still, it seems like some clear justification for this claim must be given beforehand.

    • Hah! Yeah right! Trace amount of iron oxide you say?

      The next thing you're gonna tell me is that they can be used as spinning hard disks for data storage.

      I know, I know. I bricked that one for ya.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Syberz ( 1170343 )
      Basically, we're talking about a red brick-shaped battery. How innovative...
  • We've just solved the problem of eliminating the umbilical on androids! Simply build bigger boobs and hips using these bricks!

  • I mean, I could "modify" a brick to be a battery by...putting a battery inside. How has that saved anyone anything?

    I can "modify" a brick to be a window by replacing the middle of it with a pane of glass. Yay?

    TFA says a few places that the process is "cost effective" but what does that actually mean?

    • The german article says it does not change the price of the brick significantly ... so I assume it is max 10cent per brick.

  • In other words: more surveillance. Now instead of tricking you into buying things you bring home and plug in that spy on you (which gives you the option of turning them off, or throwing them away) your entire house will be one big IoT surveillance platform. Great! Time to go back to living in caves.

  • Still OK? (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @11:26PM (#60396105)
    My local hardware store only has the brown bricks.

  • But hey, doesn't "It's just a brick" give nicer headlines than "Any porous material, just like my brainoid!"? ;)

  • I don't want to hear about someday performing every blood test simultaneously with one drop of blood or magically-purified rainwater with a bunch of arrows PPT like some "ionic" laundry-ball ad on Wish. If these stories could stick to facts and delivered technology, that would almost be half-way to journalistic integrity.
  • Slashdotter makes chicken eggs into superconductors. In amazing breakthru where they are coated with a conductor and chilled to near absolute zero.

  • Haha. Brick construction is both very stupid and is either banned or should be anywhere there are earthquakes. Do you see many brick structures in California? Hmmm.

    Meanwhile, the authors from St. Louis, presumably in Missouri, the location of possibly the strongest earthquake ever registered in the continental US, the New Madrid quake, might have some reconsidering to do.

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