Revolutionary Heat-to-Electricity Technology Breaks Efficiency Barriers, Transforms Waste Energy

A team of engineers and material scientists from the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder has developed an innovative technology that converts thermal radiation into electricity, challenging fundamental principles of thermal physics.

The breakthrough, led by Assistant Professor Longji Cui and the Cui Research Group, was achieved in collaboration with researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their findings were recently published in Energy & Environmental Sciences.

This research holds the promise of transforming manufacturing by enabling increased power generation. Crucially, it achieves this without relying on high-temperature heat or costly materials, opening doors to clean energy storage, reduced carbon emissions, and the efficient capture of heat from diverse sources like geothermal, nuclear, and solar plants worldwide.

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In other words, Cui and his team have solved an age-old puzzle: how to do more with less.

“Heat is a renewable energy source that is often overlooked,” Cui said. “Two-thirds of all energy that we use is turned into heat. Think of energy storage and electricity generation that doesn’t involve fossil fuels. We can recover some of this wasted thermal energy and use it to make clean electricity.”

High-temperature industrial processes and renewable energy harvesting techniques often utilize a thermal energy conversion method called thermophotovoltaics (TPV). This method harnesses thermal energy from high temperature heat sources to generate electricity.

But existing TPV devices have one constraint: Planck’s thermal radiation law.

“Planck’s law, one of most fundamental laws in thermal physics, puts a limit on the available thermal energy that can be harnessed from a high temperature source at any given temperature,” said Cui, also a faculty member affiliated with the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Center for Experiments on Quantum Materials. “Researchers have tried to work closer or overcome this limit using many ideas, but current methods are overly complicated to manufacture the device, costly and unscalable.”

Cui says their novel TPV devices would make its largest impact by enabling portable power generators and decarbonizing heavy emissions industries. Once optimized, they have the power to transform high-temperature industrial processes, such as the production of glass, steel and cement with cheaper and cleaner electricity.

“Our device uses commercial technology that already exists. It can scale up naturally to be implemented in these industries,” said Cui. “We can recover wasted heat and can provide the energy storage they need with this device at a low working temperature.

“We have a patent pending based on this technology and it is very exciting to push this renewable innovation forward within the field of power generation and heat recovery.”