Japanese scientists have developed a thermal battery that converts heat into electricity when buried in a geothermal zoneYou can fry an egg on the ground in Las Vegas in August, but try that in Iceland or Alaska and you’ll just end up with the stuff on your face—unless you know how to tap into the Earth’s vast reservoirs of geothermal energy.
Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of battery that can reliably generate electric power from heat in environments with temperatures ranging from 60 degrees C to 100 degrees C—which is low enough to mimic geothermal heat.
In an earlier experiment, the researchers developed sensitized thermal cells (STCs) that employed dye-sensitized solar cells to convert light into electric power