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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."
This will be awesome for mobile devices, if they can make it cheap and compact enough.
pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet What could possibly go wrong? (Also, FP?)
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
They can store, but how do one extract the energy ?
Anyone care to do the energy density calculation on a mass basis? Also I wonder how efficient the process is at converting mechanical energy to chemical energy?(it's almost like a gasoline engine running in reverse!)
Why do people always consider the mobile devices first??? Think big first:
...and finally after all other things bigger have been made to run on this you start creating the smaller versions.
- Energy storage for renewable to allow baseline operation
- Car fuel that only needs to be refilled monthly
- Backup generators that don't require huge fuel tanks
You never want to start small with new technology. Remember the problem with exploding Nokia's? I would not let a higher energy density version near my head until it's been tested in practice for years, no need to nuke my own head off...
Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet
In other words, it's unobtanium.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Hahaha.. this so reminds me of this.
Folks, what they've done is make Xenon Octa-fluoride, which is an order of magnitude harder than the previously created Xenon Tera-fluoride.
As cool as it is that some chemists have managed to make a new compound that had only been theorized before, it's not enough for the drooling media. So they try to explain why it is remotely relevant and interesting, and the media replies with this sort of gross stupidity.
Science reporting at its finest.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Damnit, it's his watch that he paid for with his money, he can do whatever he wants with it since he owns it! So what if he wants to dual boot linux on his watch and run Apache from it while torrenting the latest American Idol, it's his right!
This isn't going to find its way into any consumer products. 70 GPa? No federal agency would certify such a device to be sold into the hands of Joe Schmoe. The more meaningful consequence of this research is the demonstration of storing mechanical energy into chemical energy. In 20 years this may lead to innovations in energy storage on a massive scale, like in solar or wind power plants.
XeF2 produces _atomic_ fluorine during decomposition. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.
Niling d-sink. BAM. Next, the Commonwealth is invaded by a malicious alien.
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!
So, considering it "CAN", but not necessarily does store it, does that mean they're having some motivational issues with this material?
Will this evolve into chemical psychology?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Yes, I feel perfectly safe. The energy is just as dangerous as the vast amounts of nuclear energy stored in the atomic nuclei of the apple sitting on my desk.
I was thinking, how much energy is needed to create this material ? Because if you need 1000000x the energy to store a little it's probably not as useful.
The pressure is used in a plant to create the material, the safety very much depends on how they apply that pressure. Also you could put it in the desert somewhere if that would make you feel safe.
New things are always on the horizon
The substance is not stable when the pressure is released - it immediately decomposes. Carrying around the whole set-up where the typical payload (i.e. the compressed substance) is maybe 0.1% of the total weight of the apparatus is of course impractical. Also, this kind of high-pressure research is not exactly new. There are many published similar experiments where compounds undergo interesting crystal structure changes at ultra-high pressures. Nevertheless, bond strenghts limit what extra energy you can store in crystal structure variants. Xe-F bonds are definitely not among the strongest.
Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
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.
Actually, it can still be very useful. The advantage of a battery is not only that it can store energy, but also makes it transportable. This would be very useful to move an energy source to a location where power generation is not (easily) possible.
Consider how solar cells, even though they might cost more energy to make than they will ever supply during their lifetime are still very useful powering a communication satellite. In the same way, this material might be interesting to send to outer space, or as power supply in other very remote locations.
... 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.
Dunno... If you need 1000000x the energy, but the result can be detonated and actually release more energy per kilo than a nuke (and a cloud of atomic fluoride is just icing on the cake too), the military would drool all over it. In fact, someone probably already came in his pants reading this news.
To put it into perspective, the Manhattan Project has cost the equivalent of 20 billion 1996 dollars. (Or about 30 billion in todays dollars.) The power used by the Oak Ridge facility alone to separate the uranium that went into one of the bombs (the other was plutonium) used 10% of the total electricity produced in the USA at the time.
Compared to the modest yield of the first nukes, they genuinely pumped orders of magnitude more energy in, than they got out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
First thing I thought of was Heinlein's Shipstone. 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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
-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.
Nahhh - I can't do that. See, there really is a God. And, God put me on earth just to punish people like you, and the Anonymous Coward who called me "Annoyingly assertive". You hate me, but that is my purpose in life - to be hated by the wishy-washy liberal crowd, and the self-sure ultra-conservatives alike. It's a tough job, but SOMEONE has to do it!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
and the excess heat can be used to heat water to run turbines, and collect some of the energy pack :) Still inefficient, but does collect some of the waste back into use.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm no expert, but I seem to recall from an article that I read that the pressure of "a million atmospheres" was created by tightening the screws on the anvil by hand. If that's true, it hardly seems like a practical setup for storing and retrieving massive amounts of energy.
What manner of creature runs Linux and watches American Idol?
A hacker who's lost the remote?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
apparently, its not that bad, because the tool they did it with would fit on your desk with room for your laptop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
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'
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.