A sensitized thermal cell recovered using heat

You can find thermal energy everywhere in the world, including geothermal energy. Here we report an amazing battery that could supply power semi-permanently by simply burying the cell in a heat source and turning the switch on and off. We examined the discharge termination process of a sensitized th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of materials chemistry. A, Materials for energy and sustainability Vol. 7; no. 31; pp. 18249 - 18256
Main Authors Matsushita, S, Araki, T, Mei, B, Sugawara, S, Inagawa, Y, Nishiyama, J, Isobe, T, Nakajima, A
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Royal Society of Chemistry 2019
Subjects
Batteries
Electric power
Electrical resistivity
Electrolytes
Energy
Energy conversion
Geothermal energy
Germanium
Silicon
Single crystals
Substrates
Temperature dependence
Thermal energy
VOCs
Volatile organic compounds
Work functions
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Summary:You can find thermal energy everywhere in the world, including geothermal energy. Here we report an amazing battery that could supply power semi-permanently by simply burying the cell in a heat source and turning the switch on and off. We examined the discharge termination process of a sensitized thermal cell (STC), a new thermal energy conversion system for generating electrical power from heat previously reported by the authors. To observe this termination process, we constructed a new STC system using a narrow-bandgap semiconductor, germanium (Ge), and surprisingly found that the battery characteristics were restored after discharging by placing or burying the battery in a heat source. This discovery should bring us closer to solving global energy problems. A sensitized thermal cell makes it possible to obtain stable electric power by only burying the cell in a heat source and turning a switch on and off.
Bibliography:1
electrolyte; work function measurement of a Ge single crystal and Si/Ge wafer; demonstration movie. See DOI
10.1039/c9ta04060a
oc
Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available: The temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity when sandwiching the electrolyte between FTO substrates; the IR spectrum of the electrolyte after heating at 80 °C for 3 h in an Ar atmosphere
measurement; discharge and recovery when using 2.0 mmol g
V
I
curves at 80 °C and R.T and the first discharging curve at 100 nA of the STC; repetitive measurement of 100 nA discharging and
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in situ
optical observation during 100 nA discharge; the first
ISSN:2050-7488
2050-7496
DOI:10.1039/c9ta04060a