I can imagine the tricky bit of using it is arranging that it dumps the heat on one side of a barrier, and absorbs heat on the other side, without some ridiculously complicated and inefficient mechanical system.

Sounds like it could be useful for thermal storage at least in principle - a lot depends on the energy needed to create the force, overall efficiency, size, scalability etc.

  - Andy.

Does look interesting, thanks, I hadn't come across this before. From the various papers I can see it does look like it's at the university research lab stage at the moment (but then so were lasers, LEDs and fibreoptic cables etc etc etc once upon a time...)