Proof-of-concept of a zinc-silver battery for the extraction of energy from a concentration difference

The conversion of heat into current can be obtained by a process with two stages. In the first one, the heat is used for distilling a solution and obtaining two flows with different concentrations. In the second stage, the two flows are sent to an electrochemical cell that produces current by consuming the concentration difference. In this paper, we propose such an electrochemical cell, working with water solutions of zinc chloride. The cell contains two electrodes, made respectively of zinc and silver covered by silver chloride. The operation of the cell is analogous to that of the capacitive mixing and of the "mixing entropy battery": the electrodes are charged while dipped in the concentrated solution and discharged when dipped in the diluted solution. The cyclic operation allows us to extract a surplus of energy, at the expense of the free energy of the concentration difference. We evaluate the feasibility of such a cell for practical applications and find that a power up to 2 W per m2 of the surface of the electrodes can be achieved. © 2014 by the authors.