Posted on 02/07/2021 3:17:14 PM PST by mabarker1
Waste fibers from hemp crops out-perform graphene for a thousandth of the cost, according to new research
Is there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine.
Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries.
Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material.
A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner bark of the plant that usually ends up in landfill.
They “cooked” the woody pulp and processed them into carbon nanosheets, which they used to build supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard.
Graphene is a synthetic carbon material lighter than foil yet bulletproof, but it is prohibitively expensive to make.
“We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and we’re doing it with waste.”
Mitlin, a professor of chemical engineering at Clarkson University in New York, first published a description of his team’s battery in the journal ACS Nano in 2014.
More recently, a YouTuber named Robert Murray Smith, whose channel is all about batteries and put the hemp battery to the test against a lithium-ion battery and found it to be 8 times more powerful!
Tesla’s new million-mile battery is made from lithium-iron phosphate, which is supposed to last twice as long as conventional lithium-ion batteries.
While more abundant and cheaper than lithium-ion, lithium-iron-phosphate still can’t compete with the apparently far-more-powerful (and renewable) hemp!
(((Ping)))
Dinner time, I’ll be back in a while.
That’s all good, but there isn’t enough landmass to grow hemp to do everything it is alleged that it can do.
The pot propaganda is strong in this one...
How much hemp did they smoke before they came to this conclusion?
Probably fake data that the college kids dummied up but it gave an excuse to grow and maintain a huge number of pot plants on campus.
It can be grown vertically.
It’s industrial hemp. You can smoke a joint the size of a log and not get a buzz.
They “cooked” the woody pulp and processed them into carbon nanosheets, which they used to build supercapacitors
—
Sounds very expensive - might end up costing the same or more than lithium, much more.
I read the abstract.
It is not even about a battery. It is about a supercapacitor.
The energy densities are very small. 12 Watt-hours per kg. From the abstract:
Moreover the assembled supercapacitor device yields a maximum energy density of 12 Wh kg–1, which is higher than that of commercially available supercapacitors.
The energy density of lithium-ion batteries are typically 100 - 265 Wh kg–1.
This experimental, laboratory device, has about 4-12% the energy density of existing lithium-ion batteries.
"Hey mon, ya got any more of those "hemp batteries?"
The problem is that when these batteries catch fire, no one wants to extinguish them.
A sheet of graphene that is rolled into a cylinder form is usually referred to as a... wait for it... nanotube.
These nanotubes can be used in various ways, some similar to that of graphene, or can be "unzipped" to form graphene sheets.
-PJ
Interesting. I hope it turns into something.
Yep. The knee-jerkers are out in force.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.