Posted on 07/15/2011 10:34:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
A combination of two ordinary materials graphite and water could produce energy storage systems that perform on par with lithium ion batteries, but recharge in a matter of seconds and have an almost indefinite lifespan.
Dr. Dan Li, of the Monash University Department of Materials Engineering, and his research team have been working with a material called graphene, which could form the basis of the next generation of ultrafast energy storage systems.
Once we can properly manipulate this material, your iPhone, for example, could charge in a few seconds, or possibly faster. said Dr. Li.
Graphene is the result of breaking down graphite, a cheap, readily available material commonly used in pencils, into layers one atom thick. In this form, it has remarkable properties.
Graphene is strong, chemically stable, an excellent conductor of electricity and, importantly, has an extremely high surface area.
Dr. Li said these qualities make graphene highly suitable for energy storage applications.
The reason graphene isnt being used everywhere is that these very thin sheets, when stacked into a usable macrostructure, immediately bond together, reforming graphite. When graphene restacks, most of the surface area is lost and it doesnt behave like graphene anymore.
Now, Dr. Li and his team have discovered the key to maintaining the remarkable properties of separate graphene sheets: water. Keeping graphene moist in gel form provides repulsive forces between the sheets and prevents re-stacking, making it ready for real-world application.
The technique is very simple and can easily be scaled up. When we discovered it, we thought it was unbelievable. Were taking two basic, inexpensive materials water and graphite and making this new nanomaterial with amazing properties, said Dr. Li.
When used in energy devices, graphene gel significantly outperforms current carbon-based technology, both in terms of the amount of charge stored and how fast the charges can be delivered.
Dr. Li said the benefits of developing this new nanotechnology extend beyond consumer electronics.
High-speed, reliable and cost-effective energy storage systems are critical for the future viability of electricity from renewable resources. These systems are also the key to large-scale adoption of electrical vehicles.
Graphene gel is also showing promise for use in water purification membranes, biomedical devices and sensors.
In a capacitor, you have two conductive plates separated by a dielectric layer to store an electric field. Graphene makes a plate that has a large surface area in a very thin form factor. You can make a very substantial capacitor that way. Super capacitors are already in use to backup CMOS RAM to save configuration info on modern computer devices.
Probably that it’s ALL surface. Every atom is at the surface. There is practically no thickness, no volume to speak of.
Unlike most structures, where there is a thickness which is a practical waste of space when it’s the surface that matters.
Say the structure shown in #5 above was instead, oh, 3 atoms thick (that’s pretty darned thin) - that would have 1/3rd the surface per volume as this stuff does.
Sorta like the difference between, say, writing a book on paper vs stone tablets: if it’s a 100 page book, the paper version is compact while the stone tablet version is utterly useless.
Something that is effectively a two-dimensional plane has a very high surface-to-volume ratio.
Can you imagine the inrush current on a cap that big.
Here, they are working towards drawing electrical energy from static electricity. A few more years and the power grid will be a history.
It could be ameliorated by pulsing the initial charge with low duty cycle pulses then gradually widen the duty cycle as the charge is completed............
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Especially diamonds.........just ask your wife!..................
You'll need a ladder to charge it.
>>We, especially Americans, are so good at finding solutions for problems.
Dr Dan Li
Qualifications:
BSc, MS - Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China
Ph. D - University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Right. <<
This was forecast twenty years ago when our educational centers cut back on stressing the importance of mathematics.
Sorta like the difference between, say, writing a book on paper vs stone tablets: if its a 100 page book, the paper version is compact while the stone tablet version is utterly useless.
Well, not utterly useless.................
Lithium = expensive/rare...
Graphite = cheap/plentiful...
That’s great!
We won’t need coal plants or power plants or nuclear plants since all we will have to do is charge these ....oh.
yeah, but they didn't say a high surface to volume ratio. They didn't say a high capacitance surface. Or a high conductive area. There's lots of things they didn't say but the one thing they did say doesn't make sense.
Supply / demand = determines price................
Tesla's dream, which he dreamt up a hundred years ago. And the U.S. Government seized all his technical papers. I don't know if our Arab overlords will allow this work to continue.
“Reminds me of buckyballs”
We always called this hexamethy-chickenwire.
Wonderful stuff, if it works. I will be impressed when they market a super capacitor with the energy density of Lithium Ion at the same cost.
That will be a significant improvement.
With the advent of the Internet it doesn’t matter if what they want. Free Energy will be a fact of our life and it is being refined more and more everyday. Oil, gas, coal and the current nuclear power plants will be idle within twenty - thirty five years. The electrical power grid will slowly subside from existence as stable alternate energy units are developed and placed.
The mainstream physics community has done more to slow the development of cold fusion than anyone else. They can’t accept that cold fusion doesn’t follow the rulebook they wrote for hot fusion.
I believe that the Never A Straight Answer agency needed to be closed to give the scientific community a chance to reshuffle just who is going to invest technology in outer space. If there is anything out there that’s worth going after believe me independent business men will determine the most cost effective way to retrieve it. It will piss off the current Washington controllers that they aren’t the ones making all the decisions but that’s life.
“We, especially Americans, are so good at finding solutions for problems.”
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Cept’ this one was done by a Chinese guy at an Australian University...
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