OT- MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials

[RJSakowski]

A bit of trivia. The carbon that they are using is soot made by incomplete combustion.

When I worked for Ray O Vac in the seventies, we used a product called Shawinigan Black. It was made by burning acetylene . One of my colleagues brought a bag of it back to our lab for chemical analysis. When he was going though customs, the agent insisted on opening the bag against the advice of my colleague. A pound of the stuff could fill a very large room and it did.

 

[WobblyHand]

A bit of trivia. The carbon that they are using is soot made by incomplete combustion.

When I worked for Ray O Vac in the seventies, we used a product called Shawinigan Black. It was made by burning acetylene . One of my colleagues brought a bag of it back to our lab for chemical analysis. When he was going though customs, the agent insisted on opening the bag against the advice of my colleague. A pound of the stuff could fill a very large room and it did.

Have to say, that makes me laugh. The guys at customs don't take any grief from anyone, but sometimes, they ought to at least listen. They have a tough job, but are conditioned not to believe people who could very well be smuggling. In the case you mentioned, I'd bet they had wished they had listened to your colleague.

For the longest time, the blackest black was formed from acetylene soot. (Don't know if they have come up with something blacker.) I bet that release took an extremely long time to clean up. That soot gets on everything.

 

[rabler]

I thought that it might be something lost in the interpretation so I looked for additional releases. One that I found was actually a publication for a scientific journal. There were a lot of equations but not much in the way of an explanation as to how they intended to scale up the minuscule proof of concept that they had.

What bothered me about the whole thing was that I could see their explanation as to how the carbon structure could make one electrode but I failed to see how the dielectric barrier was formed. The only explanation that I could see was that the carbon was hydrophobic so the electrolyte could create a conductive path to it. Then the electrolyte, in conjunction with a conductive outer shell would for the other conductor. The other concern that I had is that salt solutions and Portland cement don't play well with each other. In order to form a conductive electrode, the concrete would have to be virtually saturated with the salt solution.

From this link off the original site, I think they are looking at stray capacitance between parallel nanostructure carbon wires rather than plates, possibly with nothing more than dry concrete as an insulator/dielectric. Since the lead author is in civil engineering specializing in concrete, it is completely possible the gist of the research was to achieve any capacitance while looking at the impact on the concrete strength. If the carbon fibers could simultaneously improve the strength or reduce the initial micro-cracking like glass fiber additives, then there is academic merit to the work.

Academic merit has little to do with practicality. "That's a problem for industry". From their website MIT obviously has a university level drive to research "green" technology. Whatever is trendy, that's where the (academic research) money is.

 

[RJSakowski]

Have to say, that makes me laugh. The guys at customs don't take any grief from anyone, but sometimes, they ought to at least listen. They have a tough job, but are conditioned not to believe people who could very well be smuggling. In the case you mentioned, I'd bet they had wished they had listened to your colleague.

For the longest time, the blackest black was formed from acetylene soot. (Don't know if they have come up with something blacker.) I bet that release took an extremely long time to clean up. That soot gets on everything.

They actually have come up with a blacker black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack