Thermoelectric Materials

Physicists have achieved a record-setting level of electron mobility in a thin film of ternary tetradymite. Materials like this will be essential for more efficient and sustainable electronic devices that can do more work with less power.

The need to transition to clean energy is apparent, urgent, and inescapable. Thermoelectric materials could help.

The human body could one day be used to power devices and cool down hot semiconductor chips.

If there's one thing we humans are good at, it's producing heat: significant amounts, and in many cases most of the energy we generate and put into our systems we lose as heat, whether it be our appliances, our transportation, our factories, even our electrical grid.

Can you imagine charging your mobile phone by simply using your body heat? It may still sound rather futuristic, but thermoelectrics can do it. Thermoelectrics is all about transforming heat into useful energy, mostly using inorganic materials.

What do Mozart, Christopher Columbus and J.P. Morgan have in common? It turns out they all have minerals named after them. A new member of this exclusive club has recently been inducted: Mercouri Kanatzidis, materials scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and professor at Northwestern University.

Today, over half of the total energy produced from fossil fuels is discarded as waste heat, which accelerates global warming. If we could convert the waste heat into a more useful form of energy like electricity, we could minimize fuel consumption and reduce our carbon footprint. In this regard, thermoelectric energy conversion has gained momentum as a technology for generating electricity from waste heat.

In a recent study, a research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved higher thermoelectric performance of n-type lead telluride (PbTe) by adjusting the band structure and enhancing phonon scattering. Results were published in Nanoscale.

A thermoelectric metal oxide film with a thermoelectric figure of merit of ~0.55 at 600°C has been discovered, opening new avenues towards the widespread use of thermoelectric converters.

Penn State scientists have created flexible thermoelectric devices that can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces, converting wasted heat into electricity more efficiently than previously possible.

The design could lead to a generation of more efficient thermoelectric materials

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have succeeded in creating a "superlattice" of semiconductor quantum dots that can behave like a metal, potentially imparting exciting new properties to this popular class of materials.

Cavendish physicists have discovered two new ways to improve organic semiconductors. They found a way to remove more electrons from the material than previously possible and used unexpected properties in an environment known as the non-equilibrium state, boosting its performance for use in electronic devices.

Organic thermoelectric materials hold great promise as flexible energy sources for the Internet of Things and wearable electronics. However, their relatively low dimensionless figure of merit (ZT) compared to traditional materials has been a major obstacle, limiting their use in thermoelectric power generation and solid-state cooling.

Thermoelectric materials, substances that convert temperature difference into electricity, find a multitude of applications involving the conversion of waste heat into useful electrical energy. However, they often need to rely on heavy rare earth elements for efficient thermoelectric conversion.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Qin Xiaoying from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences found the thermoelectric properties of N-type Bi2Te2.7Se0.3(BTS) could be improved by introducing a small amount of Ag9AlSe6 nanoparticles into BTS matrix.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity and vice versa, and their atomic structures are closely related to how well they perform.

The energy systems that power our lives also produce wasted heat -- like heat that radiates off hot water pipes in buildings and exhaust pipes on vehicles. A new flexible thermoelectric generator can wrap around pipes and other hot surfaces and convert wasted heat into electricity more efficiently than previously possible, according to scientists.