Abstract
Thermoelectric (TE) materials that are capable of converting heat into electricity have been considered as one possible solution to recover the low-grade waste-heat (from industrial waste-stream, motor engines, household electronic appliances or body-heat). Solid semiconductor-based TE-modules were the first to enter the commercial application, and they still dominate the TE-market today. Despite their technical robustness including long life-time, simple use involving no moving parts, TE-technology has long been limited to low-power applications due to their poor efficiency. Closely following the rise of ‘nanotechnology’ in the 1980’s - 90’s, there has been a huge increase in the TE materials research in the past 20 years, which has led to some remarkable improvements in thermal-to-electric energy conversion capacity. However, even the most “promising†materials have not yet reached the minimum ZT requirements. Furthermore, solid TE-materials suffer from a variety of practical obstacles such as small sizes, substantial production costs and the use of scarce and/or toxic raw materials, precluding them from wide-scale applications. Clearly, a technological breakthrough in TE-materials research is needed in order to make the thermoelectric technology environmentally friendly and economically viable for its future use. MAGENTA is a 4-year research & innovation project that aims at bringing a paradigm change in TE-technology by exploiting the magneto-thermoelectric (MTE) property of ionic-liquid (IL) based ferrofluids (FF), i.e., colloidal dispersions consisting of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) in non-magnetic ionic liquids. Magnetic nanoparticles are, as the name suggests, a class of nanoparticles (less than 1 mm in diameter) made of magnetic elements such as iron and nickel and their alloys and chemical compounds. They are used in a plethora of technological fields from biomedicine to data storage. However, their use in energy applications remains quite limited so far. Ionic liquids (IL), on the other hand, are enjoying substantial attention in several areas of energy research including thermoelectricity in recent decades. As a thermoelectric material, ILs present many promising features such as high electrical conductivity, large temperature and electrochemical windows, low vapour pressure and toxicity, and raw material abundance. In this presentation, I will discuss MAGENTA’s scientific motivations (how to produce thermoelectric voltage and current using IL based ferrofluids), the methodologies to be used and the project objectives; i.e., 1) to provide founding knowledge of novel MTE phenomena in IL based ferrofluids, and 2) to build application-specific MTE prototypes with tailor-made IL-FFs for their use in targeted industrial sectors (cars and portable electronics). Some encouraging preliminary results on liquid thermoelectric materials obtained by the project partners will also be presented.
Highlights
Today, heavy reliance on fossil fuels over renewable energy sources continues, witnessed by the acceleration of world’s primary energy consumption growth in the past 30 years (reaching 13000 MToe in 2014)
Much of the consumed energy is wasted in the form of heat at all levels of human activity
Thermoelectric (TE) materials that are capable of converting heat into electricity have been long considered as a possible solution to recover the low-grade waste-heat from industrial waste-stream, motor engines, household electronic appliances or body-heat
Summary
Heavy reliance on fossil fuels over renewable energy sources continues, witnessed by the acceleration of world’s primary energy consumption growth in the past 30 years (reaching 13000 MToe (million tons oil equivalent) in 2014). The electrical conductivity of these liquids, is a few orders of magnitude lower than solid counterparts and liquid based TE-systems have long been considered technologically irrelevant despite their advantages; e.g., material abundance, low production costs, etc. Nanofluids have been widely considered as cooling agents for their superior thermal transfer properties Their ability to convert heat into electricity, on the other hand, is only recently been reported. Brief and salient descriptions of three most dominant physical origins of thermoelectric potential production in complex liquids are given.[1] recent experimental evidences on the combined thermodiffusion and the thermoelectrochemical effects in magnetic nanofluids (ferrofluids) are recounted as an example. There are predominantly three different effects that induce Seebeck potential in liquid thermocells; thermogalvanic effect of redox species, thermodiffusion of ionic species and the formation of electronic double layer at electrode/liquid interfaces
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
