Project: #18
Engineering Thermoelectric Materials for Waste Heat Harvesting and Energy Sustainability
Kamran Elyas Lone
Energy sustainability is one of the major key technological challenges in this 21st century. In recent years, growing awareness and alarming concern for the environment and renewable energy supplies have revitalized advances in materials engineering and technologies for energy conversion.
Thermoelectric (T.E.) devices, with their potential to reversibly convert waste heat into useful electricity, propound the likelihood of an all-solid-state technology for power generation, refrigeration, temperature stability, and control. The T.E. material's performance is evaluated in terms of a dimensionless figure of merit, zT. Boosting the electrical transport properties and suppressing the thermal transport is critical to realizing a high zT. However, these transport properties are interlocked and confront a bigger challenge in improving the thermoelectric energy conversion efficiency. Recent advances in this field of T.E. offer unprecedented opportunities for designing and fabricating increasingly complex material systems with tunable transport properties (zT > 1). The present project is concerned with applying novel strategies and principles to designing and creating novel material systems, especially on chalcogenide-based materials with enhanced T.E. properties.