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Grid-Scale Bubble Batteries Will Soon Be Everywhere
(spectrum.ieee.org)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No. Waste heat (which is always low-temperature in respect to the device in question) can by definition not be converted to mechanical work. (Edit: to uninformed people downvoting this, this is nothing else than Carnot's law in action.)
Otherwise, one could build a perpetuum mobile: Convert heat to mechanical work, use that work to generate heat, convert it to work again, and so on. You'd have a machine that generates energy out of nothing, and that's not possible because of the law of energy conservation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperator