Condensed-Matter Physics & Materials Science Seminar

"High Efficiency Thermoelectrics in Caged Compounds"

Presented by Xun Shi, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Thursday, April 1, 2010, 1:30 pm — Bldg. 480 conference room

Thermoelectricity has great potentials in energy conversion processes from solid state cooling to harvesting waste heat and turning it into useful electrical energy. In an energy starving world, thermoelectric conversion emerges as one of the components of the overall strategy to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. It is particularly suitable for generating electricity from waste heat such as automotive exhaust gas, solar energy, and industry waste heat. Advanced thermoelectric applications are limited by the material’s dimensionless figure of merit. We show our study on achieving high thermoelectric figure of merit in filled-skutterudites and type-I clathrates. Based on the first principle calculations and thermodynamic analysis, some new compositions in clathrates and skutterudites are proposed and then successfully synthesized in experiment. Careful composition control and designs are preformed to realize low lattice thermal conductivity and high electrical power factors. The dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit is improved to 1.2 for clathrate, and 1.7 for n-type skutterudite, respectively.


Hosted by: Qiang Li

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