The cement that could turn your house into a giant battery

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Concrete is perhaps the most commonly used building material in the world. With a bit of tweaking, it could help to power our homes too.

On a laboratory bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stack of polished cylinders of black-coloured concrete sit bathed in liquid and entwined in cables. To a casual observer, they aren't doing much. But then Damian Stefaniuk flicks a switch. The blocks of human-made rock are wired up to an LED – and the bulb flickers into life.

The promise of most renewable energy sources is that of endless clean power, bestowed on us by the Sun, wind and sea. This is where Stefaniuk and his concrete come in. He and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way of creating anDamian Stefaniuk has been able to use a carbon cement supercapacitor to power a handheld gaming device

But it is still early days. For now, the concrete supercapacitor can store a little under 300 watt-hours per cubic metre – enough to power a 10-watt LED lightbulb for 30 hours. When an electric current was applied to the salt-soaked plates, the positively-charged plates accumulated negatively charged ions from the potassium chloride. And because the membrane prevented charged ions from being exchanged between the plates, the separation of charges created an electric field.

 

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