Graphene-Based Thermoelectrics

Abstract

Graphene has attracted intensive interests from broad areas of chemistry, physics, and materials science, among others. Interest in graphene's thermoelectric (TE) applications has engendered a large pile of publications and a speeding-up pace of research, making review of such research timely. This is a review covering the TE properties and their optimization strategies of graphene and graphene-based hybrids, as well as their utilizations in TE and other functional devices.

Up-scalable emerging energy conversion technologies enabled by 2D materials: from miniature power harvesters towards grid-connected energy systems

“…21,39,44,45,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73] In this review, we summarize the recent developments on the utilisation of GRM in emerging energy conversion device applications, mainly highlighting the high potential of this approach towards on-grid energy generation. Our approach bridges the wellexplored area of developing small-scale GRM-enabled energy harvesters for powering IoT devices, 1,5,7,17,19,35,[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82] with recent research directions on GRM-enabled large-scale energy conversion installations. First, the whole bouquet of the emerging properties expected at the 2D limit of GRM intimately coupled to smart energy harvesting are discussed.…”

“…Carbon materials, such as carbon nanotubes or graphene, are promising materials for TE energy harvesting due to their excellent flexibility, good stability, and high-power factor. 76 Graphene has high thermal conductivity and relatively low Seebeck coefficient, a combination, however, unfavourable for TE devices. Nevertheless, as a 2D archetypal material it has been the subject of extensive research aiming to improve its efficiency [223][224][225][226] and provide better understanding of the emerging phenomena [227][228][229][230] in 2D-layered substrates.…”

“…225,231 High degrees of functionality is offered by GO, a material that can be easily reduced to rGO by reducing oxygen presence during growth, resulting to high performing TE devices with tuneable conductivity type, band gap, and thermal conductivity. 75,76,232 Besides, hybrid approaches such as TE matrix/graphene composites could effectively achieve optimized TE performances due to various mechanisms. In particular, efficiency modulation based on geometric factors gives surprisingly high projected zT = 3-4.…”

Recent Progress of Toxic Gas Sensors Based on 3D Graphene Frameworks

“…As a 2D material, graphene has many advantages, such as large conjugated structure, high specific surface area, high conductivity, easy to be synthesized, sensitive to the gas molecules, and so on. It has been proven to be a promising high-performance gas detection material [ 22 ]. Graphene surface can easily absorb some molecules, such as NO 2 , NH 3 , CO 2 , and so on.…”

Thermal Transport and Thermoelectric Effect in Composites of Alumina and Graphene-Augmented Alumina Nanofibers

“…Introducing bandgap to graphene through doping, controlling carrier density, and Fermi engineering have a direct effect on the Seebeck coefficient. Furthermore, embedding graphene into nanostructures can provide a large number of boundaries, which strongly scatter phonons, resulting in significantly suppressed thermal conductivity [ 17 , 18 ].…”