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Researchers Develop Super Batteries From Aerogel
greenerd writes "Researchers from the University of Central Florida may have found the most efficient (and most bizarre) battery material yet – 'frozen smoke', also known as Aerogel. One of the world's lightest solids, aerogel contains multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) which each one several thousands thinner than human hair. The researchers, Associate Professor Lei Zhai and Postdoctoral Associate Jianhua Zou, believe that this material could soon become the best energy storage material for capacitors and batteries."
For insulation as well. Several companies make it, but hard to get a hold of a decent size of it at anywhere near an economical price.
Hopefully this spurns added demand to find a cheap way to produce it en masse.
Researchers Didn't Develop Super Batteries From Aerogel
If this means more research into cheaply producing areogels, that would be great. This stuff is the best insulation material (for heat) imaginable. Put that in my walls and attic, and my heating bills would go way down. Too bad it's completely impractical right now. Develop a spray-on areogel that's inexpensive and fire resistant, and you would transform the building industry.
demand is already ASTRONOMICAL
I have been playing with Aerogel capacitors for many years.
I have a couple of 2.5V 50F units sitting on my desk right now. They are about the size of an AA battery. Pretty cool. They don't have quite the energy density of an alkaline battery but you can charge and discharge them much faster. Think of charging a rechargeable AA cell in about 30 seconds.
Aerogel is not new. Their main weakness is their fragility. If you knock them around too much they break so for that reason they don't make great batteries for a lot of applications.
Dr. Zhai's faculty web page mentions conductivity and chemical sensitivity but not battery applications.
Battery electrolytes need more properties than just being conductive.
From the TFA it looks like they did not make a working device yet. Still, sounds like an interesting application for aerogel. Hopefully it is safer, cheaper, and easier to make than lithium technology
Only good as long as the smoke doesn't get out..
I only buy free, readily available natural resources in plastic bottles!!
They have at least one link missing the http:/// prefix. FAIL
Not lightest, but "least dense".
Aerogel CAN (but doesn't have to) contain multi-walled carbon nanotubes.
Which? Which what?
Several thousands of what? Times? Or did you mean "thousandths"; again, thousandths of what?
Than "a" human hair? Or just "human hair" generically?
I knew that the smoke that came out of electronics was important stuff. No wonder it stops working, all the energy has turned into a gaseous state.
As it is often the case with breaking news in battery related articles, I didn't find any numbers about the efficiency of this system in TFA. I would like to see a amazing break through in electricity storage but we have a long way to go still to match gasoline, so expect transportation prices to raise a lot as oil is slowly running out.
Energy density:
gasoline: 46.4 MJ/kg
Lead Acid Battery: 0.14 MJ/kg
http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Energy_density
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Since accelerating the mass of the batteries raises the cost even further, batteries are even less efficient for urban transportation when you accelerate and decelerate a lot. We would need to bring back trolleys or another way not to have to transport the energy source for our cars to have something efficient.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
A house using its insulation as a battery would mean a pretty big battery. With lots of these houses, we could save alot of the energy generated during the night (currently lost, thus wasted due to low demand) to be returned to the grid for use during the day, and especially the evening (peak usage period).
First of all aerogels are a whole class of materials. They aren't 'made from carbon nanotubes'. Obviously the aerogel they are working with contains carbon nanotubes, but aerogels can be made from MANY materials. You can make them from gelatin for that matter, though silica is the most common material (and what the highly insulating materials are generally based on).
In terms of battery/capacitor applications those are pure speculation. Add to the long list of possible ultra-capacitor and/or super-battery concepts. You can hardly walk into a materials lab nowadays without bumping into some guy that has an idea for a super-battery made from X.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
It's sloppy thinking to conflate mass, weight, and density. Laypeople might get away with it, but nerds tend to mind the units. That's why they're nerds, and also why their math works.
Whats their mass? For a car mass per unit energy stored may be more important than volume.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
And in fact, it's likely that you have several in your home, in various electronic devices. Aerogel capacitors, (sometimes known as 'supercaps'), have been around for years:
http://powerelectronics.com/portable_power_management/batteries/power_aerogel_capacitors_support/
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Personally I would love to see more wireless charging electronics with a single home base station. Heard about them a few years ago but no economical applications yet.
There is this. Yes, the applications are not mainstream yet, but it appears to me as though these guys are open for business and ready to go, they're just waiting on clients. This is /., if we had to wait for marketing/finance approval for every interesting new thing, we'd be reading a Sharper Image catalog.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Since I'm hoping that this topic will be read by someone who actually knows something about aerogels, I'm wondering if they could comment on some crackpot ideas (mine not the researchers! ;)
First, what is the "compression strength" of aerogels? (I'm not a material scientist so I don't know what is the proper term). If it is sufficiently high maybe it could withstand 1 atmosphere of pressure. In that case and if the aerogel structure was sufficiently light, imagine the following application: take a block of aerogel structure and wrap it in something like plastic wrap (non-gas permeable). Pump all the air out. Voila! It floats being lighter than air without using helium (costly) or hydrogen (flammable).
The reason I said "aerogel structure" is because even if a SOLID block of aerogel is still too heavy (heavier than air), a "hollowed out" block or a block like the bones of a bird's wing could be significantly lighter. In a more extreme example, perhaps aerogel struts and girders could be used to make an ultra-ultra light structure that would be enclosed by the non-gas permeable film (how about using a 1-atom thick film of graphene? It has been shown capable of resisting an atmosphere's worth of pressure!).
Secondly, how is this new (carbon nanotube based) aerogel made? Does it still require a super-critical fluid? If this (or any other aerogel) can be made in a vacuum (or if all the other materials needed for production can be recycled) perhaps it could be made IN ORBIT. Since aerogel is so light, just a "relatively" small amount of starting material (by mass) could make a large amount of aerogel (by volume). If 10 grams could make 1 cubic meter of the stuff, then 10 metric tons could make a piece 1 meter thick a kilometer square. Voila! The perfect "space garbage" collector.
As demonstrated by the NASA space probe "Stardust", aerogels are very well suited for capturing hypervelocity particles; while the Stardust probe only collected microscopic particles its aerogel was very thin, a 1 meter thick aerogel would hopefully be capable of getting much larger (paint flecks? loose screws?) sized objects. While still capable of serious damage (in the right spot anything moving at 7km/sec can hurt) these small objects are not only much more numerous than the large ones but are the hardest (impossible?) to track and are economically infeasible to track down with a "space tug". Even if didn't completely stop them dead in their tracks, hopefully they would lose so much kinetic energy as to drop out of orbit quickly.
Of course, these occasional impacts would gradually slow down the collector so it would need to be reboosted. A small but very efficient ion engine should do the trick which would also be used to go to a new orbit once it has "cleaned up" the one it is working on. Perhaps the best method would be just apply a very thin silvered film to one side and, by careful adjustments of its orientation, allow the sun's light pressure to blow it anywhere you want. (In fact if you apply crackpot idea number one, of aerogel "struts and girders" with crackpot idea numbet two, of the ability to manufacture this stuff in space and a very thin silvered film, you have the ability to make extremely large, low mass solar sails!)
Of course both schemes also require the ability to make industrial sized quantities of the stuff, affordably!
Cooper Bussman has made aerogel supercaps for years. You can get values up to like 100F that will fit in your hand and only weigh grams. Very cool but only 3v max so the uses are limited.
That aerogel could be fine for capacitors, that I can accept. But for batteries you need atoms to store the energy in. And an aerogel is mostly anything but atoms. Perhaps they fill the gaps in the aerogel, taking advantage of the conducting(?) aerogel structure? But if the aerogel structure is conducting, I don't understand why it would be fine for capacitors.
Can anyone shed some light on this?
Bert
Check out SEAgel. It's lighter than the original Aerogel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoCAxS4vqwQ&feature=related
Life is not for the lazy.
Great. Another super battery. Will this one actually reach market or is it another steaming pile of nothing?
Current supercaps are levelling out at a level below lead-acid, let alone li-ion. To get capacitance that beats li-ion batteries, you pretty much need to incorporate quantum effects. That is, at tiny scales, your discharge curve starts to take a stairstep appearance because power can't be broken down indefinitely. This lets you charge nano-capacitors to way higher voltages than macro-scale capacitors. They're limited only by the compressive strength of their walls and the tensile strength of their electrodes.
He's just being nice so my real father won't freeze him in carbonite and sell him for spice.
- my Aerogel battery leaked
- and?
- who'll pay for cleaning the room?
Forget Aerogel then, tell us more about this 'X'.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
You're right, carbon aerogels, made by pyrolizing a formaldehyde polymer aerogel are used in super-capacitors. However this has nothing to do with carbon nanotubes. In fact there is no such thing as a carbon nanotube aerogel. There are bulk nanotube materials made by some sort of deposition process that are sometimes erroneously called 'aerogel', but they're not the same thing, nor do they have as far as I can determine any actual commercial use currently.
Again, the article was basically horribly inaccurate. Sloppy science reporting at best. Frankly I couldn't even find any indication that whatever the group being reported on is working on is actually anything new. There probably IS something new there, but whatever it was the article wasn't accurate enough to figure out what it was...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
How would be named devices based on aerogel batteries? Vaporware?
Aerogel is usually formed from silica gel, or sometimes from a sort of carbon fiber paper. The material that the article talks about, which is an airy mass of carbon nanotubes produced by vapor deposition is not an aerogel. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel#Carbon
The problem with virtually any battery system that is not based on using air as an oxidizer is the potential of explosion. The higher the energy density, the greater the explosion if discharged in an uncontrolled fashion. Indeed, TFA ends with:
Seastead this.
inhabibat.com wrote, The researchers, Associate Professor Lei Zhai and Postdoctoral Associate Jianhua Zou, believe that this material could soon become the best energy storage material for capacitors and batteries.
More fluff technology journalism. Energy storage materials for capacitors are quite different from energy storage materials for batteries (no chemical reaction takes place when capacitors are charged or discharged). These "multi-walled carbon nanotubes" can't be used for both applications; I suspect they could be useful in a capacitor, but not in a battery.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Hey Rei, you seem really knowledgeable about this stuff.
What's your take on EESTOR... should we give up all hope that they'll ever deliver a product?
Has anyone actually fabricated a "nano-capacitor," or are you speaking theoretically?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Built one way they make great ultra-capacitors. In fact aerogels are the material of choice for ultra-capacitors.
It is not difficult to dope these aerogels with metal salts. If one of these doping agents resulted in a carbon-lithium aerogel, you could fill it with an electrolyte and make highly efficient lithium batteries packed in a small space. This would be an outstanding battery for long distance batteries in automotive vehicles. Or even for aircraft.
Carbon aerogels have been doped in the past with metal salts, since the 1990s. It is only natural that soon carbon-nanotube aerogels will be doped in the same manner. Then someone will use lithium as the doping material and add an electrolyte, making the most efficient lithium battery ever. Then thirty some years from now, electric cars with 100 mile/charge batteries will be economical. After the patents expire for this obvious, but as yet unmade idea.
While the news article totally sucked, they were correct. This material has a very bright possible future in both capacitors and batteries, and of course insulation and collision devices. To think it's only taken about 80 years to realize the potential uses of aerogels.