A team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a new type of concrete that could address the problem of insufficient public electric vehicle charging infrastructure in quite an innovative way. Working out of the Wyss Institute for Biological Inspired Engineering, the MIT research team created concrete that can essentially turn roads into chargers for battery electric vehicles. The team’s creation is a much more advanced version of solid-state batteries that replace liquid electrolyte in conventional batteries with a solid electrolyte.
This concrete can act as an extremely sturdy supercapacitor to charge electric vehicles as the cars drive or even as the foundation in a home. Since the concrete would only require easily accessible raw materials such as water, carbon black and cement, there would be few, if any, barriers to accessing and using the concrete to build superconductor batteries.
If the technology reaches the mass market, it could also address a problem endemic to renewable energy: peak power generation typically occurs at certain times of the day, typically when consumption is low. As a result, renewable energy has to come hand-in-hand with sufficient and reliable stationary power storage solutions to store the energy generated at peak hours. To ensure the United States meets its pollution and emission goals, these stationary storage solutions should also have as little environmental impact as possible.
The MIT researchers aren’t the first ones to consider converting concrete into batteries, but they have developed the simplest means of doing it. Since cement, a key ingredient in concrete, is not a good conductor, previous research efforts addressed this issue by infusing concrete with conductive materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene.
While this approach could turn concrete into a capacitor, it requires hard-to-make materials and was too expensive to be sustainable. The team of MIT researchers turned to carbon black instead, a cheap material that’s equally capable of turning concrete into a supercapacitor.
Admir Masic, a lead author of the study, explained that the carbon black had the ability to assemble itself into a fractal, which can be described as an infinite series of complete patterns, and which can hold an electric charge. When combined with a water and potassium electrolyte, this massive surface area essentially acts as a battery that can hold and dispense charge.
The researchers have so far created a prototype supercapacitor the size of a button with the capacity to power an LED light, but they predict that scaling up to the size of a home’s foundation could provide enough storage capacity for a day’s energy needs. Their novel concrete design could also be deployed on roads equipped with inductive technology to charge electric vehicles as they drive.
Enterprises such as QuantumScape Corp. (NYSE: QS) are also focusing on developing solid state batteries for stationary energy storage as well as for EVs. These different approaches to range anxiety and greening the world’s energy systems will yield a variety of solutions that will allow users to choose what is best suited to their needs.
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