A team at the University of Surrey has built a layered metal-polymer material that turns waste heat into electricity, and unlike the materials this field has relied on, it is cheap, flexible and recyclable.
Most electronic devices and industrial systems lose a huge share of their energy as waste heat, and until now, the materials that capture that heat and convert it to electricity have been expensive and brittle. A team at the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute engineered a new layered material using metal polymer superlattices, built specifically to be cheap, flexible, and recyclable, unlike the materials this field has relied on for years.
The applications range from wearable technology to industrial heat recovery. Some benefits are:
- Lower cost than current thermoelectric materials
- Flexible and easier to recycle at end of life
- Scalable from small wearables to large industrial systems