Gelled Electrolyte Thermoelectrochemistry: An Investigation Into Waste Human Body Heat Harvesting

问题是：人体热能能否被收集并按比例放大，以可持续地产生大量的绿色能源？方法/大纲：为了研究凝胶电解质热电化学，首先，优化凝胶以满足我们的需求，然后研究新的氧化还原对，用于在人体和环境之间的温差（约20度）附近收集热能。这将允许我们利用塞贝克效应（Se = dV/dT）从人体热量与外部环境温度不同的范围发电。这种效应在热电学中已经知道很长一段时间了，但是由于昂贵和稀有的金属只用于选择应用，而使用氧化还原对来获得这种温度差异的可能性可能会产生比热电学多几个数量级的伏特/开尔文。这种想法已经在液体和离子液体介质中被非广泛地研究，但是凝胶电解质迄今为止几乎没有被研究，并且一些文献存在许多问题，因此如果进行得当，所进行的这种研究对于绿色能量收集是重要的和有价值的。由于使用氧化还原对发电是绿色能源发电的一个相对较新的领域，我们的计划是使用铁基氧化还原对，因为铁是地球上丰富的金属。我们有潜力利用这个4年的博士学位。为这个领域做出有意义的贡献。

The question:Can human body heat energy be harvested and scaled up to possibly generate large quantities of green energy sustainably?The method / outline: To investigate gelled electrolyte thermoelectrochemistry, firstly, optimising the gels for best performance for our needs, and then investigating new redox pairs for heat energy harvesting around the temperature difference between the human body and the environment (around 20 degrees). This will allow us to generate electricity from the range at which human body heat is different to the temperature of the outside environment using the seebeck effect (Se = dV/dT). This effect has been known for a long time in thermoelectrics, but due to expensive and rare metals has been only used in select applications, whereas the possibility of using redox pairs to harvest this difference in temperature could potentially generate orders of magnitude more volts per kelvin than thermoelectrics. This idea has been looked at non-extensively already in liquid and ionic liquid media, but gelled electrolytes have scarcely been examined as yet and some of the literature has many problems, so this investigation undertaken is of importance and value to green energy harvesting if done properly. As using redox pairs to generate electricity is a relatively new area of green energy generation, our plan is to use iron-based redox pairs as iron is an earth-abundant metal. We have the potential using this 4 year Ph.D. to make a meaningful contribution to this field.