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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
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.
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
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.
Likely, very much an overstatement. Wood and glass are terrible insulators, and since houses need windows and wood studs (generally), you will still need more BTUs than a candle to heat it. Windows and doors are your major heat losers right now. At least where I live (NC), you are required to put insulation in the walls and attic of any home you build, or remodel over 50%, so it isn't like the homes don't already have reasonable insulation.
Still, it would be a much *better* insulation that could cut heat bills by a large degree, but not 99%.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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
Total rubbish. Glass only has an R value of 0.14 and softwoods about 1.4. Polyurethane foam is around 7-8.
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!
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.
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
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.
The key here is heat is a very tricky thing, and there are multiple ways it is transmitted. Wood is a good insulator, but compared to what? metal?
what if you compare wood to air? air is a much better insulator, but it tends to move around and to bump into other air, which moves the heat around.
Glass is a good insulator too. many of you probably melted glass tubing in one of your science classes in High school (probably chemistry). you were holding in your uninsulated hand a glass tube that melts at ~1500 degrees C. However, glass is also transparent, and infrared light moves easily through glass. well actually it's absorbed pretty quickly, but it moves farther in glass than in wood. So its actually insulative properties are weird, and based somewhat on the optical structure formed by the shape of the glass.
Aerogel is 99.9% air, but prevents the air from convecting inside the structure with the remaining .1%, which is why it's such a good insulator. it is also a strong infrared absorber, which cuts down on heat transfer even more. That is what makes it such a good insulator.