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Energetic and techno-economic analysis of harvesting energy from low-grade heat by thermo-osmotic energy conversion

2025· article· en· W4410549723 on OpenAlexafffund
Khaled Touati, Catherine N. Mulligan

Bibliographic record

VenueEnergy Conversion and Management · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnergy
TopicGeothermal Energy Systems and Applications
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaConcordia University
KeywordsHeat energyEnergy transformationEnergy (signal processing)ThermodynamicsEnergy harvestingEnvironmental scienceChemistryEngineeringNuclear engineeringPhysics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Low grade heat (LGH) is an abundant source of energy that can be harvested to produce electricity. Several technologies have been developed and investigated to convert LGH to electricity such us thermoelectric generators and organic cycle. Recently, thermo-osmotic energy conversion (TOEC) has been introduced as a potential technology to convert LGH to energy. However, a handful number of works has deeply investigated the theoretical aspect of the process as well as no study has performed a technoeconomic analysis to assess its viability. In the current work, we aim to investigate the viability of TOEC in harvesting electricity from LGH. First, we developed the expressions of the maximum theoretical power density, PD max , and specific energy of TOEC. Then, we investigated the impact of the type of the working fluid as well as the water recovery ratio of the TOEC nanoporous membrane. Theoretical metrics shows that very high-power density ( PD max > 800 W m −2 ) and extractable energy (2.2 kWh m −3 ) are achievable under ideal conditions. However, the results under real conditions showed that the produced energy is not high enough to prove the viability of TOEC(≤ 0.09 kWh m −3 ). In the ideal case, the low produced energy is mainly attributed to low applied pressure, which limits the extractable power. The techno-economic analysis showed, at optimum conditions, that TOEC has a levelized cost of energy LCOE = $0.66/kWh, which is relatively higher than other technologies. Finally, pathways towards TOEC economic feasibility have been discussed to face the challenges that prevent the implementation of a promising and sustainable renewable energy source.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.860
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.192
Teacher spread0.187 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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