Proof-of-Concept of a Zinc-Silver Battery for the Extraction of Energy from a Concentration Difference

Energies

Massimo Marino²  Lorenza Misuri²  Andrea Carati¹ 

[1] Dipartimento di Scienze della Salute, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, via Cadore 48, 20900 Monza, Italy; E-Mail:;Dipartimento di Matematica, Università degli Studi di Milano, via Saldini 50, 20133 Milano, Italy; E-Mails:

关键词: salinity gradient power;    power from low-temperature heat sources;    renewable energy;    zinc;    silver battery;   

DOI  :  10.3390/en7063664

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The conversion of heat into current can be obtained by a process with two stages. In the first one, the heat is used for distilling a solution and obtaining two flows with different concentrations. In the second stage, the two flows are sent to an electrochemical cell that produces current by consuming the concentration difference. In this paper, we propose such an electrochemical cell, working with water solutions of zinc chloride. The cell contains two electrodes, made respectively of zinc and silver covered by silver chloride. The operation of the cell is analogous to that of the capacitive mixing and of the “mixing entropy battery”: the electrodes are charged while dipped in the concentrated solution and discharged when dipped in the diluted solution. The cyclic operation allows us to extract a surplus of energy, at the expense of the free energy of the concentration difference. We evaluate the feasibility of such a cell for practical applications and find that a power up to 2 W per m² of the surface of the electrodes can be achieved.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.