Modern civilization is supported by cooling, and active cooling is essential for the normal operation of CPU groups in data centers and the efficiency improvement of turbines in power plants.Cooling is the work of transferring a large amount of heat energy from the high temperature side (exhaust heat source) to the low temperature side (working fluid), but at this time, most of the heat energy that can be converted into electricity (work) is lost.In the conventional "forced convection cooling" (a method in which a fluid is brought into contact with a high-temperature solid surface to remove heat), this loss is unavoidable due to the need for cooling and has not been dealt with.

　This time, the research group converted heat from heat to electricity on the liquid side, in contrast to the existing solid thermoelectric conversion technology, and used the liquid as the working fluid for cooling.Furthermore, pay attention to "thermoelectrochemical power generation," which is a type of static waste heat utilization technology that has been pursued independently of forced convection cooling.This is a technology that applies to waste heat that does not have to be cooled and recovers electric power. An electrode is inserted to generate an electromotive force between the electrodes due to the temperature difference.We designed a test cell with a new technology that integrates this technology into forced convection cooling, and succeeded in generating electricity while cooling the object.

　The important point this time is that we obtained more power generation than the pump work required to let the refrigerant flow through the demonstration cell part.This result is said to be a milestone in the transition to a new generation cooling technology that can recover the loss associated with forced convection cooling, which has not been dealt with so far.

Paper information:[Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics] Integration of thermo-electrochemical conversion into forced convection cooling