Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/BEIJING: A group of Chinese researchers has created a new battery concept that can extract thermal energy from low-temperature waste heat sources and reuse it on demand by simply adjusting the pressure.
Around 70 percent of the world’s primary energy consumption is lost after conversion, primarily as heat, and harvesting and reusing the lost energy is both profitable and environmental-friendly. The team of scientists, led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Metal Research, created a “heat battery” with ammonium thiocyanate that can store heat directly instead of converting it to other forms of energy, such as chemical energy.
They were able to take advantage of the unique “inverse barocaloric effect,” which absorbs heat with pressure and releases heat with pressure relief. This is the inverse of the usual barocaloric effect. According to Li Bing, the corresponding author of the recent study published in the journal Science Advances, a barocaloric thermal battery cycle consists of three steps: thermal charging upon pressurization, pressure storage, and thermal discharging upon depressurization.
Pressure-restrained heat-carrying phase ensures stable long-term storage: study
The study shows that the pressure-restrained heat-carrying phase can better ensure stable long-term storage. The study shows that the heat released during depressurization is 11 times greater than the mechanically energy input.
In addition to storing waste heat in thermal power plants, the thermal battery is expected to have broad applications in other areas such as smart grids, solid-state refrigeration, and house heat management, contributing to China’s efforts to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, according to the researchers.
