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CTOnews.com, August 1 (Xinhua)-concrete is an ancient and commonly used building material, but it also has the potential to become an energy storage device in the future. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new type of concrete that acts as a supercapacitor and stores electric charge by changing the way cement is made.

According to CTOnews.com, this new type of concrete is made of cement and carbon black. Cement is a material with a history of thousands of years, and carbon black is a black powder that was used as ink for the Dead Sea Scrolls 2000 years ago. Carbon black is conductive, and engineers have found that if it is mixed with cement and water in a certain way, it forms a long network of carbon "lines" as the cement hardens, making the material a supercapacitor.

"all of a sudden, you have a material that can withstand loads and store energy." Franz-Joseph Ulm (Franz-Josef Ulm), a professor of civil engineering at MIT and one of the authors of the study.

Unlike batteries, supercapacitors do not reduce their energy storage capacity over time, nor do they require the use of expensive and controversial materials in lithium-ion batteries, such as cobalt and lithium. Because carbon black is cheap, its cost is about the same as that of concrete.

This new technology could address a major challenge to the scale of renewable energy: since solar and wind energy are not always available, the rapid construction of more reasonably priced energy storage devices is a necessary condition for getting rid of fossil fuels.

Engineers choose to use cement as a raw material, in part because cement production has a large carbon footprint, and giving it a second use that supports renewable energy can make it more sustainable. The process can also be used in conjunction with new cement substitutes that can reduce emissions from the manufacturing process, such as a carbon-negative cement designed by startup Brimstone.

In a house, the solar panels on the roof are connected by cables, and the foundation made of this material can be used to store the same amount of solar energy as the house uses in a day. In wind farms, it can be used as the base of wind turbines. The concrete can also be used to make roads and recharge moving electric cars.

In the new study, the researchers found that these capacitors can be designed to charge slowly (as in a house) or discharge quickly (as in an electric car charger).

After testing a small version in the lab, the team now plans to scale up. Ulm said the first prototype could be unveiled within 18 months.

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