UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The latest episode of the "Growing Impact" podcast examines how energy from industrial waste heat could be harnessed to charge batteries.
On the podcast, Derek Hall, an associate teaching professor in the John and Willie Leone Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, discusses his work on projects titled “Increasing Power Densities and Cycle Efficiencies of Novel, Thermally Charged Flow Batteries Using Advanced Flow Cell Topologies” and “New Low-Cost Flow Battery Chemistries via Ligand-Enhanced Redox Reactions.”
These projects, which started as an exploration of ways to improve battery power and energy output, resulted in promising chemical combinations that could improve the conversion of low-grade waste heat into electrical power, according to Hall.
“Our team was looking at how electrolyte compositions affect electrochemical reactions, and how we can tune electrochemical reactions to do things that we wouldn't otherwise expect them to do,” Hall said. “We ended up finding that the particular chemistry we were focused on ended up being much better for this low-grade waste heat application.”
According to Hall, although scientists and engineers have worked to maximize efficiency, up to 50% of energy is still lost through waste heat.
“If you can make a little extra electrical power out of that, that's going to stave off how much more electrical power you're going to need from something else. The more efficient we are, the closer we get to a circular economy,” he said. “If we could shave off just 1% of the wasted heat percentage for something useful, that could add up to a really big number.”
A challenge that Hall cites is that a lot of the devices proposed to convert low-grade heat into electrical power suffer from similar problems.
“Energy efficiency and the power density — which is essentially how much power you can get out of per unit volume of a device — have been quite low across the board,” he said. “If you're going to build an effective battery of this type today, it would need to be very large. A lot of what our work is focused on now is trying to figure out how we can maximize how much power we get so we can make these smaller and closer to the scale that would be useful for us.”
Growing Impact is a podcast by the Institutes of Energy and the Environment (IEE). It features Penn State researchers who have been awarded IEE seed grants and discusses their foundational work as they further their projects. The podcast is available on multiple platforms, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify.