Technical Speaker

Wei ZENG is a Professor in the Institute  of  Chemical  Engineering,  Guangdong  Academy  of Sciences， leading the Flexible Sensing Research Technology Department.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Polymer chemistry and physics from Sun Yat-Sen University in 2007, and worked as research fellow in Institute of Textiles and Clothing, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University until 2019. Dr. Zeng’s main research interests in basic and applied research on smart sensing, wearable energy harvesting and system integration. He has achieved a series of innovative achievements in the fields of nanomaterials, energy materials, and wearable electronic devices and sensors. Dr. Zeng is in charge of more than 10 projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), GDAS Project of Science and Technology Development, and the Guangzhou Basic and Applied Basic Research Project. He has published more than 50 papers in Advanced Materials, Advanced Energy Materials, Energy & Environmental Science, etc.，and 6 books with more than 3400 citations.

Ionic Thermoelectric Generator with a Giant Output Power Density and High Energy Density Enabled by Synergy of Thermodiffusion and Redox-pair Transfer Effect

Abstract

Ionic hydrogel thermoelectric generators (ITEGs) are becoming increasingly popular in effective recovery of low-grade waste heat, but it suffers from relatively low output power density and energy density. In this work, we demonstrate an ITEG which performs a giant thermoelectric conversion property by utilizing the synergetic strategy of thermodiffusion and redox-pair transfer effect. On the one hand, an interpenetrating network structured ionic gel with temperature-sensitive phase transition behaviour are designed as thermoelectric material to achieve a very high thermopower of 40.60 mV K^-1 at a temperature gradient (ΔT) of 5 K. On the other hand, redox effect of polymer PANI on the carbon weaved fabric (CWF) electrode is appended to augment heat-to-electricity storage and output power performance. It is found that PANI@CWF electrode assist to realize a larger current density output, thereby leading to a remarkable instantaneous power density of 4530 mW m^-2. In addition, 1-hour output energy density(E_1h) (570 J m^-2) at a temperature gradient of 20 K and a maximum normalized instantaneous output power density of 11.31 mW m^-2 K^-2 are obtained, which should be the record-breaking result among the reported quasi-solid-state ITEGs. We verify a feasible routine to design the top-performing ITEGs, which shows commercial promise for continuously powering electronic devices such as sensors and wearable electronics.