Cement battery is introduced The building will become a giant rechargeable battery

Imagine a future in which an entire building, dozens of stories high and built of steel and concrete, is a giant battery that not only stores electricity, but can also be recharged and recycled. Scientists have invented a battery made of cement, which is the first step towards such a prospect.

The combination of building materials and batteries is now a popular development for batteries. This new technology is the processing of ordinary building materials cement, and it turns the cement into a battery. The house built with this battery cement has enough power to power the LED lights used in the building, or to provide the power needed to access the Internet for buildings in remote areas, etc.

If used with solar power panels, it can also provide power for various monitoring facilities used on highways and bridges, such as systems that monitor bridges for cracks and other damage.

The process of making this battery is simply to mix cement with a small amount of carbon fiber to increase its electrical conductivity and flexibility, and then add a carbon fiber network with a metal coating to it, with iron as the anode and nickel as the cathode.

Emma Zhang, Ph.D., of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, one of the lead researchers, said, “Previous research had produced cement batteries with poor performance, and we realized we had to think outside the box to come up with new ways to make electrodes. We came up with a way to make the batteries rechargeable in a way that had never been explored before. Now we’ve built a prototype version in a laboratory setting.”

“Any cement can have such a layer of electrode material added to its surface, which means that in the future, if an entire multi-story building is built from such battery cement, that building will have a huge battery capacity.”

The difficulty with this battery technology now is how easy they are to replace as they age. “The average cement building can be used for fifty or even a hundred years without problems, and the batteries must be improved to reach such a life span, or, alternatively, there must be a mechanism for easy replacement or recycling. Now, this issue is the biggest challenge facing this technology.”

The study was published March 9 in the architecture journal Buildings.