Quote:

MIT Boffins Build Battery Alternative Out of Cement, Carbon Black, and Wate https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/08/05/0112247/mit-boffins-build-battery-alternative-out-of-cement-carbon-black-and-water

So you put solid glass solar panels in the concrete road with the superconductor copper-lead and get free home and car power. If the Greens will allow it.

chimera wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 7:36pm:

So you put solid glass solar panels in the concrete road with the superconductor copper-lead and get free home and car power. If the Greens will allow it.

How about solar panels on your carport and your car charges wirelessly while parked there on the concrete? Surely even the Greens won't be able to stop that.

Or concrete cars and drive all night.

chimera wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 8:00pm:

Or concrete cars and drive all night.

Well we do have concrete boats, logical extension.

chimera wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 7:36pm:

So you put solid glass solar panels in the concrete road with the superconductor copper-lead and get free home and car power.

Nope. The solar panels get black from rubber etc. The solar panels stop working.

Very interesting. It seems a huge number of people are working on battery technology these days. Something good has to come out of it all. Yet, still we see hostility being passed off as constructive criticism. Its like they don't want electrification to succeed, but they cannot all have a vested interest in fossil fuel.

lee wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 8:06pm:

The solar panels get black from rubber etc. .

Inbuilt drip lines disperse solvent on the glass.
https://haz-map.com/Agents/92
Acute exposure to 430 ppm has been reported to cause only slight eye and throat irritation

chimera wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 8:17pm:

Inbuilt drip lines disperse solvent on the glass.

Made from refined petroleum. Also known as thinners. Just where does this dispersion occur? What scrubs the panel? Thinners is volatile. It rapidly changes to a gas. In the brochure the flash point is 100F.

"A mixture of natural gas distillates with carbon numbers of C5 to C6 and boiling points of 38 deg C to 93 deg C"

"The World's First Solar Road Has Officially Crumbled Into a Total Failure"

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-s-first-solar-road-has-turned-out-to-be-a-disappointing-failure

But as an energy store it may work.

Setanta wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 8:03pm:

chimera wrote on Aug 5th, 2023 at 8:00pm: Or concrete cars and drive all night. Well we do have concrete boats, logical extension.

They stopped building ferro cement boats a long time ago.

They don't restore ferro cement boats when they get concrete cancer it's terminal.

Setanta wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 7:55pm:

chimera wrote on Aug 5th, 2023 at 7:36pm: So you put solid glass solar panels in the concrete road with the superconductor copper-lead and get free home and car power. If the Greens will allow it. How about solar panels on your carport and your car charges wirelessly while parked there on the concrete? Surely even the Greens won't be able to stop that.

Do they have wireless car charging?

---

lee wrote on Aug 5^th, 2023 at 9:06pm:

chimera wrote on Aug 5th, 2023 at 8:17pm: Inbuilt drip lines disperse solvent on the glass. What scrubs the panel? Thinners is volatile..

Car tyres scrub the panel. Add radiator glycol to solvent.
The French road had leaves but Oz doesn't have autumn leaves, and there are no leaves or rubber on the glass there.

Baronvonrort wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 12:26am:

They don't restore ferro cement boats when they get concrete cancer it's terminal.

'Dozens of 40-year-old Gold Coast high rise apartment towers built in the 1970s face million-dollar concrete cancer repair jobs similar to the $215 million in repairs needed by Brisbane's City Hall'.

A concrete Kingswood is worth restoring. The old-style steel ones get rusty but. Use aluminium, galvanised or carbon fibre concrete. Ships are in salt-water, cars aren't.

chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 1:46am:

Car tyres scrub the panel.

That's what leaves the deposit. It won't deposit and clean.


chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 1:46am:

Add radiator glycol to solvent.

It still remains a petroleum product. Glycol leaves a residue.

"Chemicals are frequently needed to clean the glycol system."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/glycol-system


chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 1:46am:

The French road had leaves but Oz doesn't have autumn leaves, and there are no leaves or rubber on the glass there.

Yeah, now all they have to do is fix the cracks.

"Cracks have appeared, and in 2018, part of the road had to be demolished due to damage from wear and tear."

"The trial road was meant to produce about 150,000 kWh a year, which is enough power to provide light for up to 5,000 people, every day. Instead, it was making just under 80,000 in 2018, and fewer than 40,000 by July 2019."

https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2019-08/5d558b61cd978472dd671a0a-12001.jpg

It lasted less than 3 years. ::)

lee wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 1:34pm:

That's what leaves the deposit. It won't deposit and clean. Glycol leaves a residue.

The car tyres scrub the solvent. For glycol 'the most effective type of cleaner is a very heavy-duty alkaline solution', added to the drip-line. This clears grass from the road-side.  Glass is armour laminated from World War II and resists concrete car damage.

chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 2:16pm:

The car tyres scrub the solvent.

The car tyres leave rubber residue. Why do you think tyres need changing? If dust can reduce solar panel efficiency by 30% in a month, what do you think thousands of cars going over solar panels does.


chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 2:16pm:

Glass is armour laminated from World War II and resists concrete car damage.

And yet it didn't. And doesn't. Trucks get rocks between the dual wheels that loosen and fly.

"Colas, the company that built the road, said in 2016 that the solar panels were covered with resin containing sheets of silicon to make them capable of withstanding all traffic. But since the opening, panels have come loose or broken into little pieces.

In May 2018, 300 feet (90 metres) of the road had to be demolished since it wasn't salvageable."

Rubber residue is made of rubber. Solvent solves the solution. Glass repair is insured.

chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 4:07pm:

Rubber residue is made of rubber. Solvent solves the solution.

So how often are you applying the "solution". ;)


chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 4:07pm:

Glass repair is insured.

Governments, who generally own the roads, self insure. ;)

lee wrote on Aug 6^th, 2023 at 5:16pm:

So how often are you applying the "solution". ;)

Every time lee puts his head round the door.

Quote:

wo 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.”

https://news.mit.edu/2023/mit-engineers-create-supercapacitor-ancient-materials-0731

Sounds good, BUT and it is a big but, putting it in the concrete foundations? Capacitors, when the dielectric fails, go spectacularly. Even relatively small ones in a TV. If you make the foundation out of it it would be the equivalent of about 8.6kg of TNT. There goes the house. You wouldn't want it any kind of earthquake zone or where heavy traffic causes houses to shake.

Otherwise it seems reasonable.