[Timo]

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-sun.html

It's no secret that the sun is the source of all power on earth (minus the earth's core, of course), and finally, researchers have discovered a way to harvest and store all that energy for use whenever we need it. This looks so promising, i'm tempted to say let's just do it, fast, and be done with the wasteful debates about fossil fuels. We know how to use the suns energy, and now we can even store it for long periods of time for later use. This discovery should get these folks at MIT a Nobel Prize!

Storing the sun’s heat in chemical form — rather than converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container — has significant advantages, since in principle the chemical material can be stored for long periods of time without losing any of its stored energy. The problem with that approach has been that until now the chemicals needed to perform this conversion and storage either degraded within a few cycles, or included the element ruthenium, which is rare and expensive.

Last year, MIT associate professor Jeffrey Grossman and four co-authors figured out exactly how fulvalene diruthenium — known to scientists as the best chemical for reversibly storing solar energy, since it did not degrade — was able to accomplish this feat. Grossman said at the time that better understanding this process could make it easier to search for other compounds, made of abundant and inexpensive materials, which could be used in the same way.

Now, he and postdoc Alexie Kolpak have succeeded in doing just that. A paper describing their new findings has just been published online in the journal Nano Letters, and will appear in print in a forthcoming issue.

The new material found by Grossman and Kolpak is made using carbon nanotubes, tiny tubular structures of pure carbon, in combination with a compound called azobenzene. The resulting molecules, produced using nanoscale templates to shape and constrain their physical structure, gain “new properties that aren’t available” in the separate materials, says Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering.

Not only is this new chemical system less expensive than the earlier ruthenium-containing compound, but it also is vastly more efficient at storing energy in a given amount of space — about 10,000 times higher in volumetric energy density, Kolpak says — making its energy density comparable to lithium-ion batteries. By using nanofabrication methods, “you can control [the molecules’] interactions, increasing the amount of energy they can store and the length of time for which they can store it — and most importantly, you can control both independently,” she says.

[Timo]

Okay. I am holding my breath. When can I buy a Ipad Perpetual Battery? Because if I can't I don't want to bother my brain with details?

I'm the wrong guy to sympathize with your IPad dilemma. I don't even have a cell phone. My CB radio still works just fine. Twitter is just another technical version of the CB radio, you know.

10-4.

[Timo]

Okay. I am holding my breath. When can I buy a Ipad Perpetual Battery? Because if I can't I don't want to bother my brain with details?

I'm the wrong guy to sympathize with your IPad dilemma. I don't even have a cell phone. My CB radio still works just fine. Twitter is just another technical version of the CB radio, you know.

10-4.