A team of Chinese researchers has designed a new battery concept that can extract thermal energy from low-temperature waste heat sources and reuse it on demand by simply controlling the pressure.

About 70 percent of the world's primary energy consumption is lost after conversion, mainly in the form of heat, and harvesting and reusing the lost energy is both profitable and eco-friendly.

The team of scientists, led by researchers from the Institute of Metal Research under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a "heat battery" with ammonium thiocyanate that can store the heat directly instead of transferring it to other forms like chemical energy.