this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Seems interesting.
A big take away is that you can store a house's daily use of energy with the equivalent of a 9ft x 9ft cube of the stuff, and since it's still load bearing concrete, they say you could use it in a house's foundation without issue, giving basically every house a built in daily battery.
They also talk about integration into the base of wind turbines where they currently just have structure concrete, so this would be a built in energy store.
No where near as energy dense as current batteries, but insanely cheap and ubiquitous, it scales without issue in any direction, and is well suited to "grid style" electrical loads.
Can you put steel reinforcement in it? I didn't see it mentioned in the article but I could have missed it. Basically any load bearing bit of concrete will have some amount of steel in it to prevent cracking and in heavier structures to add to the strength of the concrete.
Really promising technology though, concrete is basically everywhere so if we can turn it into batteries relatively cheaply that's absolutely huge.
I doubt it. The carbon acts as the conductor to the cement's insulator. Adding rebar is likely going to cause issues. I expect this wont have applications in high rises, more akin to a cinder block or poured concrete foundations that wouldn't need reinforcement.
Might honestly be a fatal flaw for most applications where we currently use concrete, but maybe purpose built devices would still make sense at power plants/etc.
Epoxy coated rebar is already a thing, so insulated rebar shouldn't be that big of a deal - if epoxy isn't enough already.
Why can’t the steel rebar just be part of the conductive carbon anode?
The design already assumes the concrete is riddled with conductive material. Why would adding fat wires hurt?
Maybe different for different regions but I'm pretty sure foundations will generally have a small amount of steel mesh at a minimum to stop cracking. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong though and hopefully they find a way around this limitation as well. Carbon fibre can also be used from memory but I haven't seen it that often presumably due to cost.
Maybe for home foundations and the like, glass fiber rebar could be used.