Nanowire-based thermoelectrics

Abstract

Research on thermoelectrics has seen a huge resurgence since the early 1990s. The ability of tuning a material's electrical and thermal transport behavior upon nanostructuring has led to this revival. Nevertheless, thermoelectric performances of nanowires and related materials lag far behind those achieved with thin-film superlattices and quantum dot-based materials. This is despite the fact that nanowires offer many distinct advantages in enhancing the thermoelectric performances of materials. The simplicity of the strategy is the first and foremost advantage. For example, control of the nanowire diameters and their surface roughnesses will aid in enhancing their thermoelectric performances. Another major advantage is the possibility of obtaining high thermoelectric performances using simpler nanowire chemistries (e.g., elemental and binary compound semiconductors), paving the way for the fabrication of thermoelectric modules inexpensively from non-toxic elements. In this context, the topical review provides an overview of the current state of nanowire-based thermoelectrics. It concludes with a discussion of the future vision of nanowire-based thermoelectrics, including the need for developing strategies aimed at the mass production of nanowires and their interface-engineered assembly into devices. This eliminates the need for trial-and-error strategies and complex chemistries for enhancing the thermoelectric performances of materials.

Thermoelectric Properties of InA Nanowires from Full-Band Atomistic Simulations

“…Significant increases in TE performance and ZT in NWs and their networks have been reported [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. ZT values up to 1 for NWs based on several materials (Si, SiGe, InAs, InSb, Bi, PbTe, ZnO, SnSe, NiFe, and many more) have been investigated [11,[14][15][16]. Since the pioneering work by Hicks and Dresselhaus, efforts have also been focused on utilizing the sharp features in the low-dimensional density-of-states to improve the power factor as well [17,18].…”

“…Over the last several years, a myriad of materials and concepts for high ZT have evolved [1] including GeTe [2], PbTe [3], half-Heuslers [4], skutterudites [5], etc.. Low dimensional materials such as nanowires (NWs) are one of these, as they can achieve extremely low thermal conductivities due to strong phonon-interface scattering. Significant increases in TE performance and ZT in NWs and their networks have been reported [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. ZT values up to 1 for NWs based on several materials (Si, SiGe, InAs, InSb, Bi, PbTe, ZnO, SnSe, NiFe, and many more) have been investigated [11,14,15,16].…”

“…Significant increases in TE performance and ZT in NWs and their networks have been reported [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. ZT values up to 1 for NWs based on several materials (Si, SiGe, InAs, InSb, Bi, PbTe, ZnO, SnSe, NiFe, and many more) have been investigated [11,14,15,16].…”

Electrodeposition of V-VI Nanowires and Their Thermoelectric Properties

“…Nanostructuration is one of the approaches to increase the figure of merit in thermoelectric materials (Dresselhaus et al, 2007; Martín-González et al, 2013; Ali et al, 2017; Chen et al, 2018; Goktas et al, 2018; Swinkels and Zardo, 2018; Selvan et al, 2019). In this sense, nanowires are a great field of study to underline the physics behind the influence of the nanostructuration on the improvement of the figure of merit (Domínguez-Adame et al, 2019).…”

Strongly Enhanced Thermoelectric Performance over a Wide Temperature Range in Topological Insulator Thin Films

“…Nearly 70% of the world’s energy is wasted and dissipated into the environment as low-grade heat . Therefore, thermoelectric (TE) generators, which can convert heat into high-quality electricity, having advantages of solid-state operation without moving parts, no release of greenhouse gases, good stability, and high reliability, have attracted widespread research interest. − However, the TE devices available to date are still in limited application mainly because of their low energy-conversion efficiency.…”