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

问题：人体热能能否被收集和放大，以可能产生大量可持续的绿色能源？方法/大纲：研究凝胶电解质热电化学，首先优化凝胶以满足我们的需要，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摄氏度)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内发电。这种效应在热电中早已为人所知，但由于昂贵和稀有的金属只在特定的应用中使用，而使用氧化还原对来获取这种温差的可能性可能会产生比热电高出数量级的每开尔文伏特。这一观点在液体和离子液体介质中已经得到了广泛的研究，但凝胶电解质的研究还很少，一些文献存在许多问题，因此如果处理得当，所进行的研究对绿色能源的收集具有重要的意义和价值。由于使用氧化还原对发电是一个相对较新的绿色能源发电领域，我们的计划是使用铁基氧化还原对，因为铁是一种富含地球的金属。我们有潜力利用这四年的博士学位为这一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.