
'Never-before-seen material' can store vast amounts of energy - bdfh42
http://www.gizmag.com/high-pressure-energy-storage-material/15614/
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RiderOfGiraffes
Releasing the energy under control isn't discussed - I'd like to know if it's
possible, and how they'd do it.

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voidmain
It's a spring. You put in mechanical energy, you get back mechanical energy
and heat. The engineering challenge, I think, is making something that can
compress a useful quantity of the stuff.

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jacquesm
> The engineering challenge, I think, is making something that can compress a
> useful quantity of the stuff.

That's spot on.

To me the whole concept sounds like a mechanical ratchet and a spring, the
pressure pushes the chemicals in to a configuration they would not normally
achieve because of repulsive forces, the pressure helps to overcome those
forces and then the new dominant force locks in the configuration so the
pressure can be removed.

After that if you weaken the force that holds everything together the molecule
expands to its original size and will release a bunch of energy as heat in the
process.

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voidmain
I don't think the pressure _can_ be removed. Nothing in the article says this
"material" is stable at ordinary pressures. They're just saying that the
chemical structure changes as it is squeezed into a smaller and smaller space.
If you let go, it presumably expands immediately.

To be clear, I also think the energies they are storing in their experiment
are a small fraction of a joule. The "energy density" is high because the
sample is very small.

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jacquesm
If that's the case then any speculation as to applying this material is
completely premature.

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hugh3
It is the case. It's not a ratchet and a spring, it's just a spring which can
be compressed further than any spring before. (The phase changes along the way
are interesting, but will reverse themselves as you release the pressure).

Now, if you could get a giant diamond anvil cell (with house-sized near-
flawless diamonds), you could use it to compress a macroscopic quantity of
this down, and then get the energy back. The problem is that while the
substance in its compressed form may have more energy per cubic foot than,
say, a tank of gasoline, in releasing that energy it would expand to something
much larger, so your entire apparatus would be _very_ space-inefficient for
energy storage (not to mention the difficulties of obtaining those giant
diamonds).

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jacquesm
Ok. I got taken in by the 'energy stored in chemical bonds' bit.

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nopassrecover
Obviously weak on details but it would be pretty interesting to think that
energy stored in crystals (as so many sci-fi worlds use) is actually a
reality.

On the topic of details, any ballpark conceptual idea on how efficient it
would be storing and retrieving the energy from a source like this?

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jacquesm
Creating such pressures requires very tricky engineering in order to do it on
a scale that you can actually use so I would wager that it would not be very
efficient.

Diamond anvils are not exactly high volume devices. There may be a way around
that but we don't currently have one that I'm aware of.

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rmundo
Pressurizing energy into more dense forms of enegy? Goodness, they've gone and
invented energon cubes!

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rbanffy
This material sounds oddly familiar...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury#Red_Mercury_as_a_ba...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury#Red_Mercury_as_a_ballotechnic)

