Related papers: Thermoelectric Devices: Cooling and Power Generati…
Thermophotovoltaics, devices that convert thermal infrared photons to electricity, offer a key pathway for a variety of critical renewable energy technologies including thermal energy storage, waste heat recovery, and direct solar-thermal…
Thermoacoustic engines convert heat energy into high amplitude acoustic waves and subsequently into electric power. This article provides a review of the four main methods to convert the (thermo)acoustic power into electricity. First,…
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…
We theoretically investigate the enhancement of thermoelectric cooling performance in thermoelectric devices made of materials with inhomogeneous thermal conductivity, beyond the usual practice of enhancing thermoelectric figure of merit…
This manuscript reports a semiconductor-sensitized thermal cell (STC) that converts ambient heat into electrical power while simultaneously reducing its own temperature under isothermal conditions. Using a printable…
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…
Active thermal control is crucial in achieving the required accuracy and throughput in many industrial applications, e.g., in the medical industry, high-power lighting industry, and semiconductor industry. Thermoelectric Modules (TEMs) can…
Molecular junctions and similar devices described by an energy dependent transmission coefficient can have a high linear response thermoelectric figure of merit. Since such devices are inherently non-linear, the full thermodynamic…
The power factor of a thermoelectric device is a measure of the heat-to-energy conversion efficiency in nanoscopic devices. Yet, even as interest in low-dimensional thermoelectric materials has increased, experimental research on what…
Miniaturization of electronic devices aims at manufacturing ever smaller products, from mesoscopic to nanoscopic sizes. This trend is challenging because the increased levels of dissipated power demands a better understanding of heat…
Electric power may, in principle, be generated in a highly efficient manner from heat created by focused solar irradiation, chemical combustion, or nuclear decay by means of thermionic energy conversion. As the conversion efficiency of the…
The thermoelectric effect is the generation of an electrical voltage from a temperature gradient in a solid material due to the diffusion of free charge carriers from hot to cold. Identifying materials with large thermoelectric response is…
We investigate the thermopower of a metal-molecule-metal junction taking into account thermal effects on the junction. Based on analytical expressions and numerical simulations we show that the thermoelectric potential reveals valuable…
The response of electric devices to an applied thermal gradient has, so far, been studied almost exclusively in two-terminal devices. Here we present measurements of the response to a thermal bias of a four-terminal, quasi-ballistic…
Thermoelectric effects allow the generation of electrical power from waste heat and the electrical control of cooling and heating. Remarkably, these effects are also highly sensitive to the asymmetry in the density of states around the…
We explore the possibility to perform an in-situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) thermoelectric characterization of materials. A differential heating element on a custom in-situ TEM microchip allows to generate a temperature gradient…
So far, the efficiency of thermoelectric energy conversion remains low compared to traditional technologies, such as coal or nuclear. This low efficiency can be explained by connecting the thermoelastic properties of the electronic working…
Thermal energy can be directly converted to electrical energy as a result of thermoelectric effects. Because this conversion realises clean energy technology, such as waste heat recovery and energy harvesting, substantial efforts have been…
We study quantum transport through two-terminal nanoscale devices in contact with two particle reservoirs at different temperatures and chemical potentials. We discuss the general expressions controlling the electric charge current, heat…
We show that coherent electron transport through zero-dimensional systems can be used to tailor the shape of the system's transmission function. This quantum-engineering approach can be used to enhance the performance of quantum dots or…