Recent trends in thermoelectrochemical cells and thermally regenerative batteries

Abstract

<p>Given the ever-growing awareness on global warming, much interest has focused on new and effective ways to manage energy, especially by harvesting and exploiting low-temperature heat sources, ubiquitous in the modern environment. Here, the holy grail is the direct conversion of heat into electricity especially using <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/thermoelectricity" title="Learn more about thermoelectric from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">thermoelectric</a> devices, and in this contribution, we focus on thermoelectrochemical systems.</p><p>We give a brief overview of the most common thermally regenerative <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/electrochemical-cell" title="Learn more about electrochemical cells from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">electrochemical cells</a> developed nowadays with a short overview of their thermodynamic derivation, and we collect some of the most recent results in terms of their thermoelectrochemical properties, in particular, their <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/temperature-coefficient" title="Learn more about temperature coefficients from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">temperature coefficients</a>. We see that although the most used <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/redox-couple" title="Learn more about redox couples from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">redox couples</a> are based on Fe³⁺/Fe²⁺ and their derivates, thermodiffusion effects and other entropy-related phenomena are attracting the attention of the scientific community and boosting astonishing results. On the other hand, thermally regenerative batteries are emerging, showing modest performance.</p>