UNCORRELATED
UNCORRELATED
SOLID-LIQUID THERMOELECTRIC SYSTEMS WITH UNCORRELATED PROPERTIES
H2020 FET Open | Grant agreement ID: 863222
January 2020 – December 2023
More than 60% of the global power is lost as waste heat, which represents around 15 TW of power. A 10% recovery of this waste heat will exceed the summation of most current renewable energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro energy). In addition to the waste heat, ubiquitous heat sources such as the sun or even our own bodies are widely available. Thermoelectric (TE) devices can directly convert heat into electricity under safe, clean, and environmentally friendly operation. They are solid-state devices with no moving parts, reliable operation, and requiring no maintenance.
Despite large efforts to identify better TE materials, still, the TE technology is limited by low efficiency. One of the two performance improvement routes, thermal conductivity reduction, has already reached its (amorphous) limit, which makes the other route, power factor (PF) improvements, crucial. Current strategies targeting PF enhancement have only reached modest improvements, mainly due to the adverse interdependence of the Seebeck coefficient (S) and the electrical conductivity (σ), which produces a decrease in one of these properties if the other is increased. This is a serious obstacle to achieve the widespread application of the TE technology, since PF=σS2.
UncorrelaTEd concept
UncorrelaTEd is the acronym of the H2020 European Union project solid-liquid thermoelectric (TE) systems with uncorrelated properties. This project aims at reaching unprecedented improvements in the heat-to-electricity energy conversion efficiency employing thermoelectric materials. UncorrelaTEd will achieve this introduction of a new concept in thermoelectricity, which is based on the combination of a TE solid material with a tactically designed electrolyte (liquid with ions), bringing together thermoelectricity and electrochemistry.
Unprecedented PF improvements (above 35 times) have already been observed by UncorrelaTEd members in this system using a material with modest TE properties. UncorrelaTEd aims at extending these improvements to different materials (bismuth telluride alloys, oxides, and polymers) with state-of-the-art TE properties, potentially leading to an extraordinarily powerful technology able to provide more than 4 times larger PF than state-of-the-art low-mid temperature (<150 ºC) materials.
Within the project, SPECIFIC POLYMERS is dealing with the synthesis and development of state-of-the-art TE polymers with different doping levels and morphology to be integrated in the solid-liquid devices. P-type and n-type polymers to reach enhance thermoelectric properties will be specifically designed and formulated with different additives to boost their performances.
Camille Chatard, Agathe Bouvet-Marchand, Estelle Liautaud and Lucie Fournier are the project leaders in the company and the direct contacts with the project initiator Thermal and Electrical Systems Laboratory (TESLab).
Our partners in UNCORRELATED project
