Emerging Theory, Materials, and Screening Methods: New Opportunities for Promoting Thermoelectric Performance

Abstract

High‐performance thermoelectric materials have attracted immense interest due to the capability of directly converting thermal energy into electrical energy. The correlation and inherent complexity between the thermoelectric parameters pose serious challenges to improving the materials’ thermoelectric performance. Herein, the emerging novel theories in the field of thermoelectrics are summarized, such as the coherent phonon, nanophononic metamaterial, rattling effect, topological phonon, and topological electron. The impacts of these new concepts on thermoelectric performance are then reviewed. Finally, a number of promising thermoelectric materials such as one‐dimensional nanowires, two‐dimensional layered materials, and nanomesh structures are discussed. The advanced understanding of thermal and electrical transport properties in thermoelectric materials is presented herein, providing new opportunities for improving thermoelectric performance.

Remarkable Reduction of Interfacial Thermal Resistance in Nanophononic Heterostructures

“…[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] In addition to thermal management, [12] the study of heat conduction in nanoscale is also valuable for thermal barrier coating, thermal protection, [13][14][15] as well as thermoelectrics. [16] In the aforementioned physical phenomena and technological applications,…”

Thermoelectric Properties of Arsenic Triphosphide (AsP3) Monolayer: A First-Principles Study

“…For the conversion efficiency of a TE material, it is characterized by the dimensionless figure of merit ZT S 2 σT/κ (Ding et al, 2016;Gandi and Schwingenschlögl, 2014), where S is the Seebeck coefficient, σ is the electronic conductivity, T is the absolute temperature, and κ is the thermal conductivity, respectively. Over the past few decades, great progress has been achieved in enhancing the ZT values through certain strategies (Ouyang et al, 2019;Gayner and Kar, 2016), such as nanostructuring, quantum confinement, and the "phononglass electron-crystal" (Zhang et al, 2020;Hicks and Dresselhaus, 1993a;Hicks and Dresselhaus, 1993b). Therefore, searching "electronic crystal-phonon glass" thermoelectric materials has great significance (Jiang et al, 2019).…”

Ferromagnetic Silicene Superlattice Based Thermoelectric Flexible Renewable Energy Generator Device

“…Without moving parts, the Peltier effect and Seebeck effect can directly convert heat to electricity so that, thermoelectric materials can handle a lot of energy problems. The efficiency of thermoelectric conversion can be measured by the dimensionless figure of merit [12]- [16]. In spintronics and conventional electronics to process and carry information the two intrinsic electron characteristics, spin and charge are utilized [17]- [19].…”