Related papers: Geometric Thermoelectric Pump: Energy Harvesting b…
Rectification of thermal fluctuations in mesoscopic conductors is the key idea of today's attempts to build nanoscale thermoelectric energy harvesters in order to convert heat into a useful electric power. So far, most concepts make use of…
Heat dissipation is one of the most serious problems in modern integrated electronics with the continuously decreasing devices size. Large portion of the consumed power is inevitably dissipated in the form of waste heat which not only…
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat simultaneously flows from the hot to cold bath on average. To go beyond this picture, a range of works in the past decade show that, other than the average dynamical heat flux determined…
Heat resources of small temperature difference are easily accessible, free and unlimited on earth. Thermoelectric effects provide the technology for converting these heat resources directly into electricity. We present designs of…
Transverse thermoelectric effects interconvert charge and heat currents in orthogonal directions due to the breaking of either time-reversal symmetry or structural symmetry, enabling simple and versatile thermal energy harvesting and…
Thermoelectricity is the direct conversion of temperature gradient to electric voltage, and vice-versa. There are several potential applications of thermoelectricity, ranging from clean noiseless cooling, to waste-power harvesting in…
The concept of geometry works as an overarching framework underlying a wide range of transport phenomena. Particularly, the geometric phase effect in classical and quantum heat pump has been attracting much attention in microscopic systems.…
The atomic variations of electronic wavefunctions at the surface and electron scattering near a defect have been detected unprecedentedly by tracing thermoelectric voltages given a temperature bias [Cho et al., Nature Mater. 12, 913…
While thermoelectric transport theory is well established and widely applied, there remains some degree of confusion on the proper thermodynamic definition of the Seebeck coefficient (or thermoelectric power) which is a measure of the…
Thermoelectric power generators are used to convert heat into electricity. Like any other heat engine, the performance of a thermoelectric generator increases as the temperature difference on the sides increases. It is generally assumed…
Recently, the coupling of ferroelectrics with electrochemical reactions has attracted increasing interest for harvesting waste heat. The change of polarisation of a ferroelectric with temperature can be used to influence chemical reactions,…
A thermoelectric generator converts a temperature difference into electrical energy. Its energy conversion efficiency is determined by the steady-state temperature distribution inside the generator. By assuming the thermoelectric material…
The bottleneck in modern thermoelectric power generation and cooling is the low energy conversion efficiency of thermoelectric materials. The detrimental effects of lattice phonons on performance can be mitigated, but achieving a high…
In this article, we show fundamentals and recent advances on the transverse thermoelectric generation, in which a thermopower is generated in the direction perpendicular to an applied temperature gradient. Transverse thermoelectric…
Current research on thermoelectricity is primarily focused on the exploration of materials with enhanced performance, resulting in a lack of fundamental understanding of the thermoelectric effect. Such circumstance is not conducive to the…
This paper presents a new device able to turn thermal gradients into electricity by using a bimetal-based heat engine coupled to an electrostatic converter. A two-steps conversion is performed: (i) a curved bimetallic strip turns the…
Controlling the direction and magnitude of both heat and electronic currents using rectifiers has significant implications for the advancement of molecular circuit design. In order to facilitate the implementation of new transport phenomena…
Thermoelectric energy harvesters can have a much higher conversion efficiency by implementing quantum dots/wells between the high temperature region and the low temperature region. However they still suffer a limitation of the maximum…
Thermoelectricity is generally understood as a classical effect emerging from energy-dependent transport asymmetries. Here we uncover a purely quantum mechanism, where a superconducting S-I-S' tunnel junction in thermal equilibrium develops…
We present a comprehensive analysis of a dual, micro-gap thermionic-thermoelectric hybrid energy converter by developing a detailed theoretical model of the system. The Space-charge and near-field effects in thermionic conversion and the…