Journal
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Volume 8, Issue 8, Pages 2396-2401Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c5ee01192b
Keywords
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Funding
- Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW)
- NWO-VICI grant
- German Federal Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF) [03EK3013]
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Thermal energy is abundantly available, and especially low-grade heat is often wasted in industrial processes as a by-product. Tapping into this vast energy reservoir with cost-attractive technologies may become a key element for the transition to an energy-sustainable economy and society. We propose a novel heat-to-current converter which is based on the temperature dependence of the cell voltage of charged supercapacitors. Using a commercially available supercapacitor, we observed a thermal cell-voltage rise of around 0.6 mV K-1 over a temperature window of 0 degrees C to 65 degrees C. Within our theoretical model, this can be used to operate a Stirling-like charge-voltage cycle whose efficiency is competitive to the most-efficient thermoelectric (Seebeck) engines. Our proposed heat-to-current converter is built from cheap materials, contains no moving parts, and could operate with a plethora of electrolytes which can be chosen for optimal performance at specific working temperatures. Therefore, this heat-to-current converter is interesting for small-scale, domestic, and industrial applications.
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