We build houses out of bricks for many reasons. They are resistant to high pressure and frost. They can withstand changing temperatures without shrinking, expanding or warping. They are great at absorbing heat. They are durable and can be reused. And according to a new study in Nature communication they can also be developed to conserve energy.
Brick gets its warm, brown-red hue of hematite, an iron oxide often found in rocks and soil that people have used as pigment for 73,000 years. Interestingly, hematite is also used in state-of-the-art energy storage facilities. With that in mind, the chemists writing the study developed a method of modifying bricks to conserve electricity that could be used to power appliances.
The authors bought some bricks from their local Home Depot and besieged them with a gas made from a specific molecule. Since bricks are porous, that gas came into every corner and crown of the brick. When that molecule interacts with the hematite in the brick, it triggers a polymerization reaction, causing a polymer known as PEDOT, which can store and conduct electricity. They knew that the chemical process worked, because when they put the bricks in the oven, they came not red, but blue.
Using a solar system, the chemists then gave half of the bricks a positive charge and half of them a negative charge and connected them with copper band. This essentially turned the bricks into a battery, ready to conserve energy that a device can power when a switch is changed.
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As proof of concept, they tried this on some of their bricks and got to turn on a small LED light. Check it out:
These brick batteries can be charged in about 13 minutes, and have a life of about 10,000 charges. This is all very exciting, but at the moment the bricks can not store a ton of energy.
Julio D’Arcy, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington at St. Louis, who worked on the study and conducted the lab where it was conducted, said 50 bricks could store enough power to turn on three watts of emergency lighting for 50 minutes, “how much light intensity will decrease over that time.” Three watts is roughly the same as an LED desk lamp.
“We could just increase the number of bricks to increase the amount of energy you can store, but we know this is not a great strategy, as more and more bricks can become expensive,‘Sei D’Arcy.
The brick batteries could also be used to drive small electronics such as carbon dioxide detectors that do not require much energy, but the chemists think bigger. D’Arcy said if the team manages to increase the amount of energy the brick can store in an order of magnitude, then they would be equal to the storage capacity of a lithium battery. Finally, the chemists hope that the bricks can be integrated into solar-powered houses to store energy, which can be especially useful in storms or other events that threaten power supply.
And because they are made with PEDOT, D’arcy said, the bricks could have a lot of potential in the construction industry. In addition to energy storage, other researchers are developing ways to use brick purify water. That in one day it is possible that your walls of the house will supply the electricity you use and the water you drink.
There is a long way to go until these bricks are ready to be used for homes. But if chemists successfully improve their power, D’Arcy said it would not be difficult to imagine its widespread use because we are so accustomed to using bricks. We have been using them for tens of thousands of years.
“Bricks are so special to people. We live in them, we always interact with them, ”he said. “We just want to improve them.”
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