Thermal efficiency of a thermocell made of Prussian blue analogues

Recently, it was reported that a thermocell can convert temperature into electric energy by using the difference in the thermal coefficient (α = dV/dT) of the redox potential (V) between the cathode and anode materials. Among battery materials, Prussian blue analogues (PBAs) are promising materials for thermocell, because α changes from approximately −0.3 mV/K in Na(x)Mn[Fe(CN)(6)](0.83) 3.5 H(2)O (NMF83) to approximately 1.3 mV/K in Na(x)Co[Fe(CN)(6)](0.9)2,9H(2)O (NCF90). In this work, we systematically investigated the thermal efficiency (η) of the NMF83/NCF90 thermocell relative to the difference (ΔT) between low (T(L) = 282 K) and high (T(H) = 292–338 K) temperatures. We found that the thermal efficiency (η) increased proportionally with ΔT. The linear increase in η is ascribed to the linear increase in the cell voltage (V(cell)) and the charge (Q(NCF90)) extracted from NCF90. Moreover, η reached 3.19% at ΔT = 56 K, which corresponds to 19% of the Carnot efficiency (η(carnot) = 17.0%). We further confirmed that the magnitude of Q(NCF90) is quantitatively reproduced by the slopes of the discharge curves of NMF83 and NCF90.