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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 ?
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
-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.
Yes they did. C4 burns.
It won't go off without a detonator. They also use C4 on some mortar bombs as propellant (the U.S. made ones). On the tubes I am familiar with (60mm and 81mm) the bombs (whether U.S. or made elsewhere) all have something akin to a shotgun charge (sans the shot) and a primer to set it off located at the very bottom of the bomb in the round tube structure that the bomb's fins are attached to. (This is all well known to anyone who has ever fired a mortar in any country they are found... so I'm not helping anyone's enemies.) On the U.S. made bombs, small pieces of C4 are (or at least were when I was a mortarman) clipped to the fins of the bombs (there are several)( All mortars work essentially the same way, the only real difference being what the manufacturer uses as the charges on the fins).
Depending on how far you need the bomb to go (range), you either leave all the C4 charges (or whatever your bomb comes with) attached or remove a number of them as determined by a person responsible for taking the remote fire controller's (a person like a forward observation officer (FOO... who may be an NCO too)) fire mission data (coordinates of target etc) and converting it into bearings, elevations, and charge number for the mortarmen. If you really need a little extra distance it has been known to pour a little naphtha down the tube in emergency situations... not exactly recommended procedure.
Once the fire missions for a location are complete, you are generally left with a good number of these C4 charges (about an inch square, and maybe an eighth of an inch thick, wrapped in cellophane). When I say a good number, a mortar group (four mortars) can rack up a big pile a foot high or more, depending on how long they are at a location. Periodically, or when leaving, someone will take the charges and put them in a narrow, long, low pile, with a much much smaller trail of them leading off. They will ignite the smaller end of the trail and they will burn like a fuse to the pile. Then the pile burns like a son of a bitch with a lot of heat. I have seen this many times. It doesn't explode. If we had been so inclined, we could have indeed taken some of the charges and cooked with them. However didn't do this since we had stoves and it was expedient to make sure that there wasn't a whole bunch of uncontrolled C4 laying around in someone's kit (what grunts are fond of playing with isn't something you necessarily want lying around... even in a grunts hands :) ). So we always burned all the unused pieces.
As a note, even the bombs are pretty damned stable (doesn't mean I would be comfortable seeing someone drop one... but if you're closer than say 30 or 40 metres, don't bother to run if you do see this (drop to the ground maybe)... you won't make it far enough away to matter if it does go... so might as well watch the show until its errrr over). The fuses are designed not to be completely armed until they have undergone the rapid acceleration of being fired and have actually cleared the tubes. This is why some movies who have people throwing mortar bombs off of buildings at enemies have the characters bang the bottom of the bomb on the ground before throwing them over the edge... but I'm not sure if that would really be hard enough... and THAT would make ME nervous... unlike burning small pieces of C4. If you see a movie where someone might try to use a mortar bomb, even a small one (e.g. 60mm) like a grenade at ground level... it is just a movie.... I'm not sure you could throw one far enough to stay out of its kill radius even if you got it to work. Guys running through exploding shells in movies pisses me off... the scene in Band Of Brothers when they are in the forest during the Battle of the Bulge... where trees are being shredded and people are vapourized... that is closer to the truth. Also... I'm not sure I would feel all that comfortable burning a 1kg chunk of C4 (that is the size we used to blow dud grenades, bombs, and artillery shells with).
Artillery
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