A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine. The design could someday enable a fully decarbonized power grid. Better than traditional steam turbines, it converts heat to electricity with over 40% efficiency. The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to solar panels’ photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The plan is to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources (i.e. the sun) and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, dispatching the energy to a power grid.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220413131137.htm