Related papers: Optimizing Thermoelectric Power Factor by Means of…
Cross-plane superlattices composed of nanoscale layers of alternating potential wells and barriers have attracted great attention for their potential to provide thermoelectric power factor improvements and higher ZT figure of merit.…
Electron energy filtering has been suggested as a promising way to improve the power factor and enhance the ZT figure of merit of thermoelectric materials. In this work we explore the effect that reduced dimensionality has on the success of…
Using Monte Carlo electronic transport simulations, coupled self-consistently with the Poisson equation for electrostatics, we explore the thermoelectric power factor of nanoengineered materials. These materials consist of alternating…
Energy filtering has been suggested by many authors as a means to improve thermoelectric properties. The idea is to filter away low-energy charge carriers in order to increase Seebeck coefficient without compromising electronic…
Direct thermal-to-electric energy converters typically operate in the linear regime, where the ratio of actual maximum power relative to the ideal maximum power, the so-called fill factor (FF), is 0.25. By increasing the FF one can…
The field dependence of power factor for a layered thermoelectric material with a closed Fermi surface in a quantizing magnetic field and at helium temperatures has been studied in the geometry where the temperature gradient and the…
We investigate the electric and thermoelectric transport coefficients of nanocomposites using the Non-Equilibrium Greens Function (NEGF) method, which can accurately capture the details of geometry and disorder in these structures. We…
In the past decade, there has been significant interest in the potentially advantageous thermoelectric properties of one-dimensional (1D) nanowires, but it has been challenging to find high thermoelectric power factors based on 1D effect in…
We investigate the effect of electrostatic gating on the thermoelectric power factor of p-type Si nanowires (NWs) of up to 20nm in diameter in the [100], [110] and [111] crystallographic transport orientations. We use atomistic…
The addition of porosity to thermoelectric materials can significantly increase the figure of merit, ZT, by reducing the thermal conductivity. Unfortunately, porosity is also detrimental to the thermoelectric power factor in the numerator…
This work describes through semiclassical Boltzmann transport theory and simulation a novel nanostructured material design that can lead to unprecedentedly high thermoelectric power factors, with improvements of more than an order of…
A particularly promising pathway to enhance the efficiency of thermoelectric materials lies in the use of resonant states, as suggested by experimentalists and theorists alike. In this paper, we go over the mechanisms used in the literature…
Nano-structuring is an extremely promising path to high performance thermoelectrics. Favorable improvements in thermal conductivity are attainable in many material systems, and theoretical work points to large improvements in electronic…
Carbon nanotube (CNTs) networks embedded in polymer matrix have been extensively studied over the recent years as a flexible thermoelectric (TE) transport medium. However, their power factor has been largely limited by the relatively…
Using atomistic electronic structure calculations and Boltzmann semi-classical transport we compute the thermoelectric power factor of ultra-thin-body p-type Si layers of thicknesses from W=3nm up to 10nm. We show that the power factor for…
Low dimensional structures have demonstrated improved thermoelectric (TE) performance because of a drastic reduction in their thermal conductivity, {\kappa}l. This has been observed for a variety of materials, even for traditionally poor…
Investigating in detail the physics of energy filtering through a single planar energy barrier in nanostructured thermoelectric generators, we reinforce the non-trivial result that the anticipated enhancement in generated power at a given…
It is suggested that low dimensionality can improve the thermoelectric (TE) power factor of a device, offering an enhancement of the ZT figure of merit. In this work the atomistic sp3d5s*-spin-orbit-coupled tight-binding model and the…
The authors use two insulator layers in thermotunnel refrigerator to modify the shape of the tunneling barrier so that electrons with high kinetic energy pass it with increased probability. Theoretical analysis show that the overall…
Conventional thermionic power generators and refrigerators utilize a barrier in the direction of transport to selectively transmit high-energy electrons. Here we show that the energy spectrum of electrons transmitted in this way is not…