PEDOT coating turns bricks into supercapacitors

Chemists in the School of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis have developed the so-called ‘smart bricks’ that can store energy until required for powering devices. A proof-of-concept published in Nature Communications shows a brick powering a green LED light.

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"Our method works with regular brick or recycled bricks, and we can make our own bricks as well," said Julio D'Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry. "As a matter of fact, the work that we have published in Nature Communications stems from bricks that we bought at Home Depot right here in Brentwood [Missouri]; each brick was 65 cents."

D'Arcy and colleagues, including Washington University graduate student Hongmin Wang, first author of the new study, showed how to convert red bricks into a type of supercapacitor.

"In this work, we have developed a coating of the conducting polymer PEDOT [poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene], which is comprised of nanofibres that penetrate the inner porous network of a brick; a polymer coating remains trapped in a brick and serves as an ion sponge that stores and conducts electricity," D'Arcy said in a statement.