Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

The development of reliable and environmentally friendly approaches for energy conversion and storage is one of the most challenges that our society is facing. The purpose of this research is design and discovery of novel materials for high efficiency and performance of new energy devices by combining thermoelectricity (TE), batteries and artificial muscles (AM), so-called “hybrid energy systems” (HES). The TE is a solid-state devices that generate electricity from a temperature gradient, and it is ideal to recover waste thermal energy and heat from sunlight. The battery is composed of several electrochemical cells to provide the required voltage using electrochemical energy storage. And the AM is an actuator device that can generate mechanical energy under an applied voltage. Based on our previous works of the TE and AM [1, 2, 3], we will continue to improve the performance for each energy systems (TE, battery, and AM) by combining the density functional theory (DFT) with multiscale analytical models. Besides that we also establish a theoretical framework to predict and guide experimental designs for the HES. Such hybrid energy systems might play a major role in future energy conversion and storage technologies.