Polymer–Inorganic Thermoelectric Nanomaterials: Electrical Properties, Interfacial Chemistry Engineering, and Devices

Abstract

Though solar cells are one of the promising technologies to address the energy crisis, this technology is still far from commercialization. Thermoelectric materials offer a novel opportunity to convert energy between thermal and electrical aspects, which show the feasibility to improve the performance of solar cells via heat management and light harvesting. Polymer–inorganic thermoelectric nanocomposites consisting of inorganic nanomaterials and functional organic polymers represent one kind of advanced hybrid nanomaterials with tunable optical and electrical characteristics and fascinating interfacial and surface chemistry. During the past decades, they have attracted extensive research interest due to their diverse composition, easy synthesis, and large surface area. Such advanced nanomaterials not only inherit low thermal conductivity from polymers and high Seebeck coefficient, and high electrical conductivity from inorganic materials, but also benefit from the additional interface between each component. In this review, we provide an overview of interfacial chemistry engineering and electrical feature of various polymer–inorganic thermoelectric hybrid nanomaterials, including synthetic methods, properties, and applications in thermoelectric devices. In addition, the prospect and challenges of polymer–inorganic nanocomposites are discussed in the field of thermoelectric energy.

Gold Nanomaterials and Bone/Cartilage Tissue Engineering: Biomedical Applications and Molecular Mechanisms

“…Nanomaterials are tiny particles with size distribution less than 100 nm. In the last decades, various types of nanomaterials have attracted the attention of many researchers in photocatalysis (Pan et al, 2021), electrocatalysis (Zhang et al, 2021a), photoelectrocatalysis (Hu et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2020;Huang et al, 2021), solar utilization (Jiang et al, 2020), heat management (Zhang et al, 2021b) and other fields because of their unique properties (Wang et al, 2019;He et al, 2020). Among the numerous materials, Au represents one well-studied type (Xu et al, 2016) with tunable shape (Zhu et al, 2015), structure (Ma et al, 2015), and composition (Jiang et al, 2017).…”

Understanding the Effects of Primary and Secondary Doping via Post‐Treatment of P‐Type and N‐Type Hybrid Organic–Inorganic Thin Film Thermoelectric Materials

“…to rationally design materials with high figures of merit (zT = σS 2 T κ −1 ). [8][9][10] In particular, hybrid materials composed of tellurium (Te) nanowires (NWs) embedded in poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophen e):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) have been prominently studied after Yee et al reported that their TE performance could be tuned by varying the length of the NWs and modulating the amount of PEDOT:PSS incorporated into the system. In this way, they were able to achieve a power factor (PF = σS 2 ) close to 100 µW m −1 K −1 .…”

Recent advances in designing thermoelectric materials

“…An effort to design environment-friendly thermoelectric materials has led to the discovery of Pb-and Te-free Cu-and Sn-based chalcogenides, skutterudites, chalcopyrites, carbon based materials, and so forth. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] Notably, the thermoelectric figure of merit has reached a maximum value beyond two in recent years for single-crystal SnSe at 1000 K, which has been considered the most promising thermoelectric material to date. [30][31][32] The spiral plot in Fig.…”