SUBJECT: | Ph.D. Proposal Presentation |
BY: | Pablo Salazar Zarzosa |
TIME: | Thursday, May 2, 2013, 1:30 p.m. |
PLACE: | Love Building, 210 |
TITLE: | THERMO-ELECTROCHEMICAL CELLS: NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATION AND ENGINEERING OF NOVEL ELECTRODES AND ELECTROLYTES |
COMMITTEE: | Dr. Baratunde Cola, Co-Chair (ME) Dr. Satish Kumar, Co-Chair (ME) Dr. Peter Hesketh (ME) Dr. Todd Sulchek (ME) Dr. Sankar Nair (CHBE) Dr. Thomas Fuller (CHBE) |
SUMMARY
Thermo-electrochemical cells (TECs) are devices that could convert waste heat to electricity inexpensively. However current TECs have low conversion efficiencies. As a starting point, I developed a comprehensive multiscale model that couples the governing equations in TECs (mass and heat transfer, electro-kinetics and fluid dynamics). The simulation results using an aqueous potassium ferri/ferrocyanide solution showed that TECs are limited by the ionic diffusion at the cold electrode. In addition, the model was used to find the optimum cell thickness, aspect ratio and number of cells in a series stack. In light of this ionic diffusion limitation, I investigated the current approaches used in the literature for other electrochemical devices to overcome this limit and improve performance. In particular, the addition of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to a solvent-free ionic liquid (IL) electrolyte showed an efficiency improvement of 300% in dye-sensitive solar cells (DSSCs). |