Project description
Solid thermal battery for waste heat harvesting
Materials that convert and store energy are essential for advancing new energy technologies and driving economic growth. Funded by the European Innovation Council, the Heat2Battery project represents a significant breakthrough by integrating heat harvesting and storage into a single device. Unlike traditional thermoelectric generators, which rely on a constant temperature gradient, this innovative battery uses waste heat at high temperatures to charge at room temperature to generate electricity. Previous thermal batteries depended on liquid electrolytes, which restricted their operational temperature range and material stability. In contrast, the Heat2Battery initiative focuses on developing all-solid-state thermal batteries, where every component, including the electrolyte, is made from solid materials. This offers a next-generation solution for energy sustainability, with the potential to transform energy harvesting and storage.
Objective
Thermal batteries are devices that convert thermal energy without the need for a spatial temperature gradient, giving them an
enormous potential advantage over competing methods. Despite its promise, thermal batteries are yet not suitable for practical
application as they were demonstrated only with liquid electrolytes, which severely restricts the operation temperature range to
ΔT<50 K and an electrochemical stability window to pair with thermodynamically efficient electrodes. The goal is to develop a
completely new paradigm towards all-solid-state thermal battery (thermal cell), which is based on reversible changes of the materials’
electrochemical properties and on H+ transport operating on recovered waste heat over an unusual wide range of temperatures of
ambient to 300°C. We envision the solid thermal battery to charge at a defined low and high constant temperature due to phase
changes and H+ intercalation taking place at the electrodes. Fundamentally, we contribute to a new thermal battery concept, suggest
materials to translate the proposed chemistry-at-work and give a proof-of-concept to gain first electrochemical performance insights
defining thin film device architectures. Collectively, the here proposed solid thermal battery closes the ever-existing gap between
thermoelectric and liquid based thermal batteries through widening of the thermal operation window to capture waste heat and
defining a new set of H+ solid conductors and interfaces suited for energy storage. The fundamentals derived on electrochemical
interfaces and H+ conductor films such as ceria-based, metal hydride, binary oxide and possibly high entropy alloys for electrolytes
and electrodes contribute in their design and careful discussion of electro-thermo-chemistry, thermodynamics and kinetics to
engineering design principles of the here proposed fully solid thermal batteries for energy harvesting putting waste heat to work
with perspective for industry translation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.3.1 - The European Innovation Council (EIC) Main Programme
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-EIC-2024-PATHFINDEROPEN-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-EIC - HORIZON EIC GrantsCoordinator
2800 Kongens Lyngby
Denmark