Posted on 02/07/2021 3:17:14 PM PST by mabarker1
Waste fibers from hemp crops out-perform graphene for a thousandth of the cost, according to new research
Is there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine.
Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries.
Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material.
A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner bark of the plant that usually ends up in landfill.
They “cooked” the woody pulp and processed them into carbon nanosheets, which they used to build supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard.
Graphene is a synthetic carbon material lighter than foil yet bulletproof, but it is prohibitively expensive to make.
“We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and we’re doing it with waste.”
Mitlin, a professor of chemical engineering at Clarkson University in New York, first published a description of his team’s battery in the journal ACS Nano in 2014.
More recently, a YouTuber named Robert Murray Smith, whose channel is all about batteries and put the hemp battery to the test against a lithium-ion battery and found it to be 8 times more powerful!
Tesla’s new million-mile battery is made from lithium-iron phosphate, which is supposed to last twice as long as conventional lithium-ion batteries.
While more abundant and cheaper than lithium-ion, lithium-iron-phosphate still can’t compete with the apparently far-more-powerful (and renewable) hemp!
OK, Thanks.
My patron saint would b e St. Jude.
Yup. But the pro dope lobby has been using the line that hemp is miracle product to make the pot more acceptable to the American people. And the acceptance of pot in our society has accelerated our turn away from freedom and into socialism.
Although the article is really about carbon nano-fibers created from the hemp plant, the title of this article “Hemp Batteries...” is purposely written to sensationalize; it’s clickbait.
If the information they’re trying to convey is actually true, then having an alternative material to create energy storage cells is actually a great innovation. I hope it’s true.
I guess we’ll see in a few years.
Y’All are making My head hurt with all the Technical stuff. I’ll just get a Bicycle with Training Wheels and stay home in bad weather.
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