this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago

But what if your home was the battery?

But what if your walls could talk.

The cement devices are a kind of simplified battery called supercapacitors.

Yeah, cement as a supercap is a terrible idea on every conceivable level. First off, cement CO2 emissions are astounding. Second, what happens when this porous material gets wet and a short to ground happens? Your cement pad suddenly vaporizes you if you turn on the sink.

If carbon black cement was used to make a 45-cubic-meter volume of concrete—roughly the amount used in the foundation of a standard home—it could store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy

So, 65 metric tons of cement to store the energy equivalent of less than 700 cylindrical cells, or two Tesla modules from an old Model S. This is purely idiotic. Oh, and it's never serviceable or upgradeable without tearing up and relaying all that concrete. A battery pack you could hide in your closet is capable of vastly outpowering this 45 cubic meter pipe dream.

It's too bad "science" doesn't filter out obvious junk, because it would be a much better site.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

Pay no attention to the physics behind the curtain.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This feels like solar roads

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

solar -freakin- roadways. please give me millions to work on this technology now

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Even more like structural EV batteries.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

45-cubic-meter volume of concrete—roughly the amount used in the foundation of a standard home

This is more than 45 tons of bs 🤐

What a dreamer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Doesn't seem completely impossible with the estimated storage capacity, but like with all of these things, drastically changing the build up of concrete means changing the properties of the very thing used to hold your home together.

It might be cheap materials, but the effort involved also seem very high having to cut up after the hardening to create the super capacitors. Which again may affect structural integrity.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

This is the kind of low brow stuff we don't want to see in a science feed. This is not science, it's snake oil.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

The "could" in the headline is extremely speculative. It says in the article they managed to power a few LED lights using a small slice of electrified cement.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

nearly limitless sure buddy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

*As long as you define limitless as 10kWh or like less than 1/5th of an EV battery