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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."
It's not clear to me if they've even got a way of releasing the energy (is the compressed form stable?). If they have, then you're going to have to generate electricity from the mechanical expansion of a solid. The most obvious way we achieve that currently is a coiled spring, which probably won't work in this case.
As the article says, this is basic science.
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...
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!
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!
Sorry, I'm too lazy to log in. PhD in materials science, etc.
It's called a metastable state. It is stable because local perturbations to the structure raise the energy. If you heated diamonds up enough, they would turn to graphite because they are not the most stable state of carbon at room temperature and pressure. So, diamonds are "metastable" because they aren't truly "stable" but they also won't change on timescales that we work with due to kinetic limitations. Theoretically the diamonds will eventually become graphite, but the probability is extremely low because the thermal energy isn't high enough to let it move.
Also, where else but the internet do random people with PhDs in materials science happen by these sorts of questions? I am very happy that I can answer your question, because thermodynamics is some of the coolest math I have ever seen.
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!
Yes.
This process is known as fire.
Diamonds burn at temperatures comparable to most carbon containing materials (such as wood).
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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