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New Material Can Store Vast Amounts of Energy
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."
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!
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!