97: A Foundational Technology - Cement Batteries
[Music] hey everybody welcome to the still to be determined podcast this is of course the podcast that follows up on topics from the youtube channel undecided with matt farrell i'm sean farrell i'm his older brother his being matt not the channel [Laughter] i'm matt's older brother i'm a writer and i'll be asking him the questions matt say hello hello how are you doing today pretty good how about you i'm okay i believe at this point that my video is back up on the channel i know that people may have enjoyed not seeing me last week but i think i'm back now we're gonna make that call depending on how things look i'm band-aid wearing but otherwise i'm okay for anybody who's curious the issue with my face other than its normal hideousness was that i had a spot of basal cell carcinoma and had a mohs procedure done which is a targeted surgery to remove the the cancerous portion and then a skin graft to fill that little hole and it's on the side of my nose it is not huge but the overall effect of having what was effectively a golf ball-sized bandage last week would have made for a distracting video yes it would have been very distracting i'm now down i'm now down to a band-aid so uh babies tip of the hat to the to the doctors at sloan kettering who did the procedure tip of the hat to science in general for figuring out hey we can very carefully do this and remove cancer from your body so everything went well and hopefully my nose will be even more handsome than it was when they started today we're not gonna be talking about my nose no we're gonna be talking about matthew's most recent episode which was titled turning buildings into batteries question mark concrete battery storage explained this was from november 30th 2021 and it revolved around a technology that sounds fanciful it's it does the idea of building batteries using concrete so that you could effectively pour a concrete slab and it could hold a charge and release that charge over time and the dream of the people pushing this this technology would be you farcically in your video uh make reference to this skyscraper it could be the world's largest battery you didn't yeah mean that seriously no no no no yeah it's like it's one of those in theory if you did this it would be the world's biggest battery but obviously yeah i'm not gonna do that from the the nitty gritty uh no pun intended the nitty gritty of the video it seems like the people who are pushing this technology are looking for small case very targeted use where it would be well sidewalks that might have led light strips or you'd have bridges that could have technology measuring stress on the bridge that are powered by a battery which is effectively fed by maybe a solar panel or something that's built onto the bridge so that you would end up having best case scenario would be this is a low energy storage option that would be so in the background nobody is talking about this being you're gonna have a flashlight that's made out of concrete this is not right being pushed as a replacement for more direct energy use the researchers that do this these kind of studies they're not pushing the technology for a specific thing they're it's research not for the sake of research but they're researching this to see if there's something there and if it can be done effectively way and their suggestions are more realistic it's like they were talking about like the lamp post like you could have a little solar panel on the top of a lamppost that charges the battery during the day and it's enough power in the post itself to supply power overnight it's like that's pretty straightforward seems simple it's not like you're going to be putting this into your home actual home and saying i don't need to test the power wall because my walls are doing it we would be so far away from that and it may never actually be able to be done that way because this is so low power compared to something like lithium ion it's really it seems like smart technologies smart cities sensors you know early warning systems for concrete failure and buildings and stuff like that is where this could actually be very useful but not for a mass storage system yeah and it wouldn't even be something that would be a backup power source for some major event you know the power goes out due to a storm or earthquake and your building is perfectly fine because you have these the concrete battery of your foundation is now powering your your building it's a matter it seems to me a matter of how much power could be discharged at a this is effectively a chemical reaction it's a chemical battery yes it's a chemical battery different version of the chemical state than what we're accustomed to we're accustomed to metal and acid and this is not a metal and an acid so it's going to be i got a kick out of the video where it said in the laboratory the scientists were able to get an led light to glow for many hours and the light is literally a tiny little little like if you turned off all the lights in that room that light would do nothing for you other than let you know where that light is yes exactly so yes in in a case where you're looking for what would this be used for i think that i kept going back to like for emergency lighting for a strip of lights that go along a sidewalk in a otherwise very dark place just to let you know where the sidewalk is that kind of use but not like oh good news the power grid went down but your solar powers and your foundation are going to be enough to store your energy for the foreseeable future yeah like emergency lighting or lamp posts or like i said smart sensors for a city it's like that kind of stuff is where this seems like it's most likely if it succeeds where it would end up going but it's it's one of those this is so far from that and i even mentioned this at the end of the video that this is lab scale they've only done limited testing it's lab scale and they still have more testing to do beyond this and then if they improve it beyond that it still then has to get commercialized so it's like it's one of those this is very early days but i thought it was a really interesting i don't call it a breakthrough in the research necessarily but it's like it's a really interesting milestone in looking at concrete batteries or cement batteries as a potential path that is kind of like a oh raise an eyebrow there might be something there keep an eye on that for the future it spurned some interesting comments in the comments on the video that if i put these together effectively a few of the viewers are basically playing my role in creating this asking very good questions and doing it in a way that really demonstrates some some smart thinking i want to start with this one from victor j who wrote here are some possible problems that popped it up in my head and i just want to run some of these by you and if you don't know because of the technical aspects of this that are behind you obviously we just jump past it but some questions include how much does it complicate the cement pouring practice that's currently in use that's the thing was like i have no clue and the main reason is this is being done in a lab in a very controlled setting and sometimes when the researchers are doing this kind of study they're not necessarily thinking 10 steps down the road of now how are we going to actually make this it's more of a academic exercise at this point so i have no clue how it would affect the actual pouring exercise down the road there was also the question of how do the anodes cathodes and additional add-ins to the cement affect the structural integrity of the cement from what i found it doesn't but again that's from what i found in the research paper and everything like that so it's like in my researcher who helped me put this together it's like we didn't necessarily find anything specific about the integrity of this concrete but it looks like it doesn't but that's a question i'd want to ask too and find out but that's the kind of stuff that would come in future iterations and future tests and then the last two questions i think are very interesting and i can't imagine that there's been any research in this vein yet but the question of what happens during a critical failure of one of these batteries do you have a situation where the concrete effectively could maybe degrade at an accelerated speed or is there the potential for something like the leaching of a hazardous chemical or something coming out of it that would be a problem and the other question is if you have something that is effectively holding a charge like this and discharging what would that do to bluetooth and wi-fi signals in the immediate area those are good questions which is a great question would you it's a great question yeah i don't have an answer to it it's like those are really good questions yeah as somebody who has noticed patterns in my own home of oh when i take my laptop to a specific place and the signal gets kind of funky and knowing like oh well i'm on the opposite side of the room that has the microwave and you know like all these devices that could affect that signal and even noticing patterns of if my cell phone is too close to my video game controller it will affect the connectivity between the controller and the game system but those are all radio waves that are competing with each other it's like there was um there's actually a monitor the lg ultrafine monitor that was made for max years ago and the first iteration of that monitor was really funny didn't have the proper shielding on it and so you'd be using this monitor and it would screw up your wi-fi like it would get you disconnected from wi-fi so you got this monitor you plug it in and start using it and your wi-fi would go in and out and stop working in fact the speed is because they didn't shield it so the second iteration that they put the proper shielding in and the problems fixed but so it's like yeah that sounds like problems with a terrible problem yeah no that's a horrible problem so it's one of those this this is something that i i don't know the answer to it it could it couldn't but i don't there was nothing in the the literature because like i'm not a scientist but when i read these research papers they don't explore that so it's like i would we would need to talk to somebody that would have better knowledge for how is that even possible because i don't believe this is not emitting radio waves or anything like that so it's like i don't imagine it would affect wi-fi or bluetooth but it's interesting interesting to yeah to talk to somebody and and look in that vein yeah there was also this question from dark who wrote one danger i can see is the fact that electrolyte and batteries gets used up over time not consumed but it changes its composition and that's why capacity drops what would happen to a house if there were bricks of this fashion in the walls would you effectively have a finite amount of time that they would work or again it keeps going back to the question of does something structural happen to the concrete over time so that it would actually become a weaker spot that's the thing where it's like that's where more testing is needed because these tests were short like short-term tests they only did six cycles of the battery so it's like they weren't like looking at the concrete for a year or simulating three or five years it was literally just build the battery test it what kind of results do we get after six rounds of testing and now it's going to be probably more like what does it look like after 30 rounds of testing or 100 rounds of testing and simulating three years of abuse five years of use it's like that kind of thing it's like that's part of the whole process of this so this is still so early that it's like there was no data that i found on that it also raises questions about temperature impact yeah which is something that's come up in so many of your other videos about these various technologies where it works as long as it's not too hot or too cold and when you're talking about a chemical reaction we know that chemical reactions and batteries have direct impact from being too cold you can effectively stall the chemical reaction so would this be something that would only be able to be used in the subtropical or tropical zone as opposed to being able to use it somewhere if you go back to the idea of like okay you've got a lamppost and lamppost has a concrete foundation and the concrete foundation is the battery but if you're in winitoba in the middle of january are you just building a lamppost that doesn't actually do anything for you because it's just too cold right there was also this from zero one of one who wrote and this is a longer one but i think it's it's an interesting comment one of the reasons why modern concrete bridges need to be replaced every 30 to 40 years is because of a red ox reaction the iron steel rebar within the concrete starts to rust which expands in volume as it does so this expansion especially when combined with colder temperatures or wetter climates causes the concrete to crack which allows more moisture in and then increases the redox reaction even more the fact that this cement is based upon a redox reaction worries me how long with will the concrete last even if the concrete lasts how long will it remain operational as a battery i think this requires a massive amount of study and further development before it can be considered a viable alternative concrete itself without the rebar can last a thousand years or more if you get the right mix and don't add anything that can rust the coliseum in rome is a prime example of this but the basically just yeah it's an amazing comment it's it's like if you ever do a deeper dive into this subject it seems like this is a comment and among the others that that i spotted that you should start your your your research with because it's it's something like this that just perfectly illustrates the comparison of you take the coliseum in rome and other ancient sites around the world which are built out of stone in some cases porn uh not porn something very different in some cases poured stone structures which have been you know created and moved in and put into position but effectively bricks and those bricks lasting hundreds hundreds of years but as is pointed out the beginning of the comment we have to replace modern bridges and the reason for that is because of this kind of reaction which is the very key to the battery charge that is being talked about so it really does create the question of are you looking at a technology which is self-defeating is this yes does this ultimately land in the in the area of being a completely academic exercise and really very fascinating that they're able to say look we've we've held a charge we're able to power this light from this brick but would the very aspect that creates the storage and the ability to release that charge doom that brick to a life cycle of a handful of years it's really it's really interesting that's what that's where i brought up the comment of it's this is early days it's like there's still more testing that has to be done but this is one of those the study caught my eye because i was like oh this is interesting and it's one of those i've been recently starting a new series on my channel which is just called revisiting and so i'm kind of going back to topics i talked about a year ago see how they're doing i'm going to be doing this on a more frequent basis now and so it's like this is the kind of thing of this caught my eye in a year i'll probably come back and revisit this and do a deeper dive on it see where it's gone what hasn't gone if it's fizzled out because they discovered something like this so it's one of those this is more of me just raising awareness of hey this is a cool piece of news that came out let's keep our eye on it so i definitely want to revisit this at some point in the future yeah i think it's it's definitely worth revisiting because this is it looks like a bit of magic when you have the ability to do what they're doing in the lab but as is often the case what can be done in the lab under very controlled circumstances might not have a practical application it might not have a practical application ever or for a long time your channel is full of videos which start off with the first person to ever come up with this idea was in 1840. yeah yeah the it doesn't it doesn't mean that this will never have an application but the fact that it's such specific conditions at this point i think it's very early days and you know tongue-in-cheek you say like oh this building would be the world's biggest battery but you know the reality is we're not looking at the next 5 or 10 or even 15 years of anybody saying i need to plug my house into my house yeah now there's there's also i probably need to make a better distinction this in my videos when i'm talking about future tech versus talking about what's more current because this is like you just mentioned it could be 15 20 years before this ever becomes a thing if it can become a thing because there's a huge gap between bench lab testing and making a commercialized product and there are tons of great amazing technological ideas that never get to that part because they can't figure out how to mass produce it they can't figure out how to commercialize it they've discovered halfway along the way that there is no really good use case because a different technology beat them to the punch and now they're kind of like it's kind of pointless it's too expensive whatever it is it's like so many products fail in between that lab and commercialized product space so it's like this may never happen it may never go anywhere but it's one of those it's interesting and cement batteries are not new but what their advancement is is new and so it's kind of like raising an eyebrow of oh there might be something here again so let's keep close eye on that yeah definitely worth checking out in the future and revisiting so the listeners i'm curious this is probably not the only tech that matt has talked about that deserves a revisit i'm curious to the listeners what of matt's previous videos would you like him to go back and take another look at and provide an update and maybe examine has there been progress or have things stalled or as it turned out that what was there has just kind of stood still and there hasn't been a whole lot of development one way or another let us know you can find the contact information in the podcast description or you can if you're on youtube just scroll below this video and leave a comment there don't forget there are ways to directly support the podcast you can visit still tbd.fm and you'll see the support the podcast link or if you're watching us on youtube and again my apologies for the band-aid we have a membership button it's the join button and you're able to provide us support directly there we do appreciate whatever kind of support you're able to give whether it's just listening subscribing and sharing this with your friends all of that really does help the podcast the podcast helps the channel the channel helps matthew and then matthew uses still images of me holding bagels over my face in place of my bandaged face we'll talk to you next time everybody thanks so much for listening [Music]
2021-12-11 14:00
