Advances in Thermo-Electrochemical (TEC) Cell Performances for Harvesting Low-Grade Heat Energy: A Review
, Nikolay Kiselev 1,2, Denis Artyukhov 4, Elena Boychenko 1,2, Andrey Yudin 1, Yuri Konyukhov 1, Maksim Kravchenko 5, Alexander Gorokhovsky 4 and Denis Kuznetsov 1
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript presents an in-depth overview on the advances made in TEC design and performances focusing of different aspects, new growth areas and emerging concepts in the choice of redox couples, electrolytes, electrode design and configurations. The manuscript is well organized. A brief summary of historical developments in the field is provided in Section 2. Sections 3 and 4 highlight developments in redox couples, electrolytes and electrodes spanning several research directions. Emerging applications of thermocells in the fields of wearable and portable devices, energy storage and associated applications are presented in Section 5. The article concludes with highlighting economic concerns and future perspectives. Thus, I recommend publication of this manuscript in Sustainability after minor modifications by the authors.
1. The format of Table 1 needs to be reformatted. The last two lines are in the wrong format.
2. The authors mentioned the well-known thermoelectric materials. Compared with traditional thermoelectric materials, what are the advantages of TEC?
3. In the last section, the authors have not pointed the clear commercial perspective of TEC. What is the point of studying TEC materials if there are no favorable commercial prospects or applications?
4. Please cite some references: Rare Met. (2021) 40(8):2017–2025, ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2019, 11, 22457−22463, Nanoscale, 2018, 10, 15130–15163.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In this manuscript, Burmistrov and co-authors claimed that they present an overview on the thermo-electrochemical cell (TEC). The authors claimed recent developments in TEC performances are reviewed in this article with specific focus on new redox couples, electrolyte optimization towards enhancing power output and operating temperature regime, use of high surface area nanomaterials for increasing current density and device performance.
Overall, this review is useful for the development of TEC in future research and industry field as a guideline to introducing new researcher into it. Also, it is a decent guidebook for researcher to learning the mechanism and fundamental about TEC. However, the manuscript is not polished yet, some parts of it are not convinced and solid. I think if the questions below could be addressed, it will be suitable for publishing in Sustainability.
1, for the title, it should be thermo-electrochemical cell (TEC) and “cell” should be located before the abbreviation.
2, in the introduction part, I would suggest authors add a part about comparison between solid state TEG and TEC. What pros and cons about TEC and why it brings attention in recent time? I think it will help reader to understand more about the TECs.
3, for emerging application part, authors give lots of example about how researchers using TECs for wearable devices. I would suggest authors add some figures or schemes which could quote from the origin reference in Figure. 3. It will help reader understand more about the how TECs used in future applications and how them look like.
As conclusion, my suggestion of this manuscript is “minor revision”.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
