Home sweet home? Turning your home into a battery just came closer to reality. Rechargeable cement batteries could allow for whole sections of multi-storey buildings to be made of functional concrete. Energy storage technology has a core role to play in meeting emissions reduction targets. A rechargeable cement battery that’s becoming a realistic possibility could change the way you store energy, turning the walls of your house into a giant battery. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden developed cement batteries that can store around 10 times more energy than previously developed structures, even though at the moment they are still hundreds of times less energy-dense than a lithium-ion battery. To make the structure, a cement-based mixture with small amounts of short carbon fibres inside is embedded with a metal-coated carbon fibre mesh: iron for the anode and nickel for the cathode, according to a research team led by Dr Emma Zhang. “Results from earlier studies investigating concrete battery technology showed very low performance, so we realized we had to think out of the box, to come up with another way to produce the electrode ,” Zhang says in Science Daily. “This particular idea that we have developed […]
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