Nearly 70 percent of the energy produced in the United States each year is wasted as heat.
Much of that heat is less than 100 degrees Celsius and emanates from things like computers, cars or large industrial processes.
The thin-film system uses a process called pyroelectric energy conversion, which the engineers’ new study demonstrates is well suited for tapping into waste-heat energy supplies below 100 degrees Celsius, called low-quality waste heat.
Pyroelectric energy conversion, like many systems that turn heat into energy, works best using thermodynamic cycles, kind of like how a car engine works.
“These thin films can help us squeeze more energy than we do today out of every source of energy.”.
“All we’re doing is sourcing heat and applying electric fields to this system, and we can extract energy.”.
The next steps in this line of research will be to better optimize the thin-film materials to specific waste heat streams and temperatures. »