Recent advances in thermoelectric nanocomposites

By Weishu Liu, Xiao Yan, Gang Chen, Zhifeng Ren. 2012

682 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Thermoelectric power generation represents a class of energy conversion technology, which has been used in power supply of aeronautic and astronautic exploring missions, now showing notable advantages to harvest the widely distributed waste heat and convert the abundant solar energy into electricity at lower cost than Si-based photovoltaic technology. Thermoelectric dimensionless figure of merit (ZT) plays a key role in the conversion efficiency from thermal to electrical energy. Most state-of-the-art thermoelectric materials are characterized with various nanostructures from fine grains, dispersed particles, nano-inclusions to atomic defects, and therefore are referenced as nanocomposite. Recently, remarkable advances have been achieved in various material systems through the introduction of different nanostructures to tune the transport of phonons and electrons. In this review, we firstly clarify some fundamental tradeoffs dictating the ZT value through the relationship ZT=(S2σ/κ)T. We also pay special attentions to the recent advances in some selected materials, including half-Heuslers, PbTe, CoSb3, Bi2Te3, etc. Finally, we provide an outlook of new directions in this filed, especially a proposal on a new concept of ordered nanocomposite.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Civil and Structural Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c1ec57998018791f86ca18da353ddacc1c49908

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Zhifeng Ren
2. Weishu Liu
3. Lidong Chen
4. Gang Chen
5. David J. Singh
6. C. Uher
7. Xun Shi
8. Zhuomin M. Zhang

In Civil and Structural Engineering

1. Gang Chen
2. Lidong Chen
3. Zhifeng Ren
4. Weishu Liu
5. Xun Shi
6. C. Uher
7. Saniya LeBlanc
8. Chao Han

In Materials Chemistry

1. Lidong Chen
2. Zhifeng Ren
3. Xun Shi
4. C. Uher
5. Gang Chen
6. Weishu Liu
7. Li-dong Zhao
8. Jihui Yang

Citations in the corpus

• Tailored semiconducting carbon nanotube networks with enhanced thermoelectric properties (2016, positive): “Nanostructuring of bulk inorganic semiconductors (ISCs) has shown particular promise for improving thermoelectric (TE) energy conversion devices, which convert thermal energy from waste and natural heat sources into electricity, owing to the beneficial formation of nanoscale interfaces 1–3 .”
• Thermoelectric generators: Linking material properties and systems engineering for waste heat recovery applications (2014, background): “Excellent reviews of thermoelectric materials have provided descriptions of both thematerial classifications and the relationship betweenmaterial structure and thermoelectric properties [13,14,26], so comprehensive descriptions are not provided here.”
• New trends, strategies and opportunities in thermoelectric materials: A perspective (2017, background): “One of motivations was to reconstruct the transport channel of electrons in traditional nanostructured thermoelectric materials with randomly distributed defects through modulation dopants, regular-shaped inclusions, orderingdistributed inclusions, textured grains boundary and ordering porous struct”
• Recent progress in thermoelectric materials (2014, background): “[19] also summarized TE materials in different kinds; Chen and co-workers [20] have reviewed”