Ultra-high thermal effusivity materials for resonant ambient thermal energy harvesting
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s41467-018-03029-x.pdf
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2.08 MB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cottrill, Anton Lee
Liu, Albert S
Kunai, Yuichiro
Koman, Volodymyr
Kaplan, Amir
Mahajan, Sayalee Girish
Liu, Pingwei
Toland, Aubrey R.
Strano, Michael S.
Date Issued
February 2018
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Cottrill, Anton L. et al. “Ultra-High Thermal Effusivity Materials for Resonant Ambient Thermal Energy Harvesting.” Nature Communications 9, 1 (February 2018): 664 © 2018 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Materials science has made progress in maximizing or minimizing the thermal conductivity of materials; however, the thermal effusivity - related to the product of conductivity and capacity - has received limited attention, despite its importance in the coupling of thermal energy to the environment. Herein, we design materials that maximize the thermal effusivity by impregnating copper and nickel foams with conformal, chemical-vapor-deposited graphene and octadecane as a phase change material. These materials are ideal for ambient energy harvesting in the form of what we call thermal resonators to generate persistent electrical power from thermal fluctuations over large ranges of frequencies. Theory and experiment demonstrate that the harvestable power for these devices is proportional to the thermal effusivity of the dominant thermal mass. To illustrate, we measure persistent energy harvesting from diurnal frequencies, extracting as high as 350 mV and 1.3 mW from approximately 10 °C di urnal temperature differences.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Terms of Use
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03029-x
