Evil chemistry turns ordinary bricks into appliances for storing electricity – Raw Story

The Research Letter is a short take on interesting academic work.

The big idea

In my synthetic chemistry lab, we worked out how the red pigment can be converted into ordinary bricks into a plastic that conducts electricity, and this process enabled us to transform bricks into electricity storage devices. These brick supercapacitors could be connected to solar panels to charge rechargeable energy. Supercapacitors store electrical charge, unlike batteries, which store chemical energy.

Brick’s porous structure is ideal for storing energy, because brick pores provide more surface area than solid materials, and the larger the surface area, the more electricity a supercapacitor material can hold. Bricks are red because they contain the clay they are made of iron oxide, better known as rust, which is also important in our process.

We fill the pores in bricks with an acid vapor that dissolves the iron oxide and converts it into a reactive form of iron that allows our chemical syntheses. We then flow another gas through the cavities to fill them with a sulfur-based material that reacts with iron. This chemical reaction leaves the pores covered with an electrically conductive plastic, PEDOT.

The resulting film covers the brick surfaces with nanofibers that resemble the fine filaments produced by molds. The nanofiber structure of our conductive polymer has a low electrical resistance as well as a high surface area, making it ideal for energy related applications.

A few pieces of PEDOT-coated brick are capable of driving an LED, and based on our calculations, about 60 bricks could send in regular size 50-light emergency light, and they would take 13 minutes to charge. One of the surprising results of our research is that the brick wall of the supercapacitor can be charged 10,000 times, which is on par with more traditional PEDOT supercapacitors. We have published our results in the journal Nature Communications.

Why it matters

We have iron oxide, which is a single waste product, converted into a reactive intermediate – a substance useful in chemical reactions. By controlling a chemical reaction using this intermediate, we have produced current semiconductor nanofiber coatings.

Converting rust into a useful chemical source material is cost-effective and demonstrates how inert materials have the potential to be transformative in chemical manufacturing. Our work shows how waste can be upcycled and reused to produce advanced materials that extend the functional constraints of building materials.

What other research is being done in this field?

Our work is the first to prove energy storage in brick, however other researchers are changing chemical bricks for other uses. The red pigment in brick has been used as a chemical catalyst, however, this important processing is required to ensure the purity of the separated iron oxide. Nanoparticles of metal oxide have also been combined with both brick and concrete to remove atmospheric pollution. Other groups have made bricks that absorb carbon nanomaterials to form electrodes that can conduct electricity.

What comes next

We need to increase the amount of energy that our bricks can store in an order of magnitude. We are working on ways to convert the structure of the nanofibers into composites that contain other semiconductors to stimulate the amount of energy that the nanofibers can store.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

We scale up the chemical synthesis so that we can reduce the cost and produce polymercoated brick quickly. We are also developing new chemical syntheses that promote self-assembly in brick to form the nanofibers 3D patterns, which will increase the surface area.

Our goal is to develop bricks that are patterned and ready to stack without the need for wires. We aim to produce devices that can be assembled such as Lego blocks.

Julio M. D’Arcy, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, University of Washington at St Louis

This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.