MIT and The Wyss Institute Researchers Develop Affordable Supercapacitors

Efforts in searching for renewable energy solutions are continuously in motion, especially as the world’s energy consumption ceaselessly rises over time. While many countries have resorted to storing and supplying energy with renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and tidal, honing them can be taxing, requiring plenty of cost and time to achieve.

With current solutions still draining exorbitant resources, whether to power homes, electronics, or transportation, a number of parties, such as companies, organizations, government agencies, and researchers, are still incessantly setting their sights away from coal and fossil fuels.

MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, along with four other researchers at MIT and at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, are among them, currently developing supercapacitors made using a combination of man-made as well as ancient materials; water, cement, and carbon black.

Materials Matter

Used as alternatives to conventional batteries, capacitors are simple devices consisting of two electronically conductive plates doused in an electrolyte, separated by an insulating, membrane-like material. An electric field is created between the two plates when a voltage is applied across the capacitor, charging it. The charge can last a long time, used to both store and supply energy. A supercapacitor works the same way, but stores charges in an abundantly larger manner.

How much energy a capacitor can store depends on the size of its conductive plates, requiring aluminum, tantalum, and niobium as the main materials to build. While aluminum is the most abundant metal on Earth, not the same can be said about niobium nor tantalum, considered the rarest stable metal on Earth.

This rarity, in addition to the fact that excessive use of lithium-powered batteries can greatly harm the environment, is why water, cement, and carbon black have become alternative materials for supercapacitors that MIT researchers believe will become a useful renewable energy solution.

Carbon black, whose texture bears similarities to extremely fine charcoal, is a highly conductive material. When mixed with cement and water that has cured, small spaces and branches will be formed, allowing the carbon black to flow and create conductive-like structures.

The researchers believe that no matter how small the volume of the mixture is used, there will always be a large surface area. Once this process is completed, the structure is to be soaked in an electrolyte solution to create charged particles. Then, a supercapacitor is created.

Energy Storage and Uses

Whilst testing out the carbon black, cement, and water mixture, the researchers discovered a perfect ratio that serves their main goal, which is the need for big energy storage and a source that makes energy so readily available. This was achieved by creating a mixture where a very small percentage of about 3% carbon, the relatively rarest material of the three, to successfully develop a functioning supercapacitor.

The team states that the supercapacitor can be incorporated into the concrete foundations of houses, storing a full day’s worth of renewable energy. Initial uses of the mix, anticipating a time prior to mass production, could potentially be for isolated, off-the-grid homes, buildings, or shelters that already have solar panels powering them to support the supercapacitors’ capabilities.

However, the polarizing results each ratio brought seem to suggest that the mixture’s adjustability can make the supercapacitor a multifunctional device, storing and supplying energy for several different use cases.

By adding more carbon black, for instance, the supercapacitor would have the ability to store more energy but have less structural integrity due to the lack of concrete. In this case, the supercapacitor would be more useful in building concrete roadways to store energy produced by solar panels alongside roads, delivering solar energy to EVs traveling along the road, compared to the foundation of a house. Roadway charging has also become a potential use of the supercapacitor that the researchers find genuinely plausible.

The research, which is supported by the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and sponsored by the Concrete Advancement Foundation, also included postdocs Nicolas Chanut and Damian Stefaniuk from MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, James Weaver from the Wyss Institute, and MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Yunguang Zhu.

By having a supercapacitor using clean energy sources with an easily reproducible nature that can be charged and discharged rapidly, the team believes that electricity can someday be produced at any time they are needed without harming the environment. If a way of producing cement with less carbon can be found, endless sustainable possibilities are underway.

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