Evaluation of redox pairs for low-grade heat energy harvesting with a thermally regenerative cycle†

Abstract

Waste heat, particularly of low-grade (lower than 100 °C), represents a considerable amount of energy loss across different industries and areas of human development. In recent years, different ways of harvesting heat have been the focus of extensive research, with the thermally regenerative electrochemical cycle (TREC) being of particular interest due to its promising results, derived from using the temperature coefficient of electrolytes to obtain more efficient charging and discharging battery cycles. While studies have shown groundbreaking results by trial-and-error-based combinations of different redox couples, these studies have been mostly isolated from one another, possibly missing unseen potentials of unexplored redox couple combinations. Therefore, a wider view of these combinations is explored in this work to screen them for the TREC battery applications. Herein, we present a comprehensive survey of the redox couples used in the literature to highlight the untapped potential of a TREC cell. Furthermore, strategic guidelines on choosing the efficient redox couples for the TREC with engineering remarks and insights for their practical heat-to-electricity conversion applications are presented.