Power storing bricks

 Scientists have found a way to store power in the red bricks that are used to build homes.

Researchers lead by Washington University in St Louis, in Missouri, US, has invented a method that can turn the cheap and available making material into “smart brick” that can store power like a cell.

Although the research is still in the proof-of-idea stage, the scientists claim that walls made of these bricks “could store a substantial amount of power” and can “be again charged hundreds of thousands of times with in an hour”.

The researchers developed a methods to change red bricks into a type of power storage device called a super capacitor.

This involved putting a conduct coating, known as Peadot, into brick examples, which then seeped through the fired bricks’ layers structure, converting them into “power storing electrodes”.

Iron oxide, which is the red colour in the brick, used with the process, the scientists said.