Solid-State Electrochemical Heat Engine

This paper explores the potential of using solid-state electrochemical heat engines operating on reversible redox reactions to continually harvest waste heat from available thermal energy from natural and man-made sources.  These systems are electrolyers/fuel cells that operate on thermal energy.  These systems utilize and control the electrochemical potential of molecules undergoing redox reactions in a manner to produce electrical energy from thermal energy.  The electrochemical potential of these redox pairs is a function of composition, temperature and pressure. EHE’s in this paper exploit the change in basic thermodynamic properties with temperature. Each EHE is not only an energy storage device, but an energy producer using no fuel other than waste thermal energy.  The EHE technology can be deployed using fuel cell/electrolyser combinations.