Chapter 12Conclusions and Future Trends
Energy storage in the future will remain as a critical part of our society. There is no doubt that humans will continue to explore more efficient and reliable ways to store and carry energy. Although we can store energy relatively successfully through a wide range of techniques and mechanisms, electrochemistry will continue to offer one of the most attractive methods in the future. In this chapter, we will discuss several emerging and future trends in energy storage and provide concluding remarks.
12.1 Future of Energy Storage
Electrochemical cells will continue to provide the most useful and convenient energy storage method, especially for mobile and portable applications. In other words, electrochemical devices like batteries are here to stay for a very long time. For this reason, we will focus our attention on emerging and future trends that are mostly related to the electrochemical cells.
One of the basic advantages of the electrochemical energy storage devices is their fundamentally high thermodynamic efficiency. Since electrochemical processes are not heat engines, the Carnot efficiency limitation is avoided. The efficiency, η, of a heat engine, a device for the conversion of thermal energy to mechanical or electrical work output, is expressed as follows:
(12.1)
where Th and Tc are the high and low temperatures of the thermal ...
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