Related papers: Efficiency in nanostructured thermionic and thermo…
The concept of coherence is one of the fundamental phenomena in electronics and optics. In addition to electron and photon, phonon, is another important energy and information carrier in nature. Without any doubt, exploration of the phonon…
We explore layered strongly correlated materials as a platform to identify and control unconventional heat transfer phenomena. We demonstrate that these systems can be tailored to sustain a wide spectrum of heat transport regimes, ranging…
Nanostructured silicon is a promising material for thermoelectric conversion, because the thermal conductivity in silicon nanostructures can be strongly reduced with respect to that of bulk materials. We present thermal conductivity…
A comprehensive rational thermal material design paradigm requires the ability to reduce and enhance the thermal conductivities of nanomaterials. In contrast to the existing ability to reduce the thermal conductivity, methods that allow to…
High Seebeck coefficient by creating large density of state (DOS) around the Fermi level through either electronic structure modification or manipulating nanostructures, is commonly considered as a route to advanced thermoelectrics.…
Wireless power transfer (WPT) has garnered increasing attention due to its potential to eliminate device-side batteries. With the advent of (distributed) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), radio frequency (RF) WPT has become feasible…
A multiplicity of autonomous terminals simultaneously transmits data streams to a compact array of antennas. The array uses imperfect channel-state information derived from transmitted pilots to extract the individual data streams. The…
Charged carriers in solids diffuse from hot to cold sides under temperature gradient to induce the thermoelectric voltage. Carrier filtering effect, which only passes either electrons or holes for the conduction process, is an efficient…
Self-heating effects can significantly degrade the performance in nanoscale devices. We investigate self-heating effects in such devices based on two-dimensional materials using ab-initio techniques. A new algorithm was developed to allow…
Quantum interference in nano-electronic devices could lead to reduced-energy computing and efficient thermoelectric energy harvesting. When devices are shrunk down to the molecular level it is still unclear to what extent electron…
It has been suggested that superhydrophobic surfaces, due to the presence of a no-shear zone, can greatly enhance transport of surface charges, leading to a considerable increase in the streaming potential. This could find potential use in…
Over the past years, thermionic energy conversion (TEC) with a reduced inter-electrode vacuum gap has been studied as an effective way to mitigate a large potential barrier due to space charge accumulation. However, existing theoretical…
Tailoring thermal properties with nanostructured materials can be of vital importance for many applications. Generally classical phonon size effects are employed to reduce the thermal conductivity, where strong phonon scattering by…
Machines are only Carnot efficient if they are reversible, but then their power output is vanishingly small. Here we ask, what is the maximum efficiency of an irreversible device with finite power output? We use a nonlinear scattering…
It has been proposed for a long time now that the reduction of the thermal conductivity by reducing the phonon mean free path is one of the best way to improve the current performance of thermoelectrics. By measuring the thermal conductance…
The large variety of complex electronic structure materials and their alloys, offer highly promising directions for improvements in thermoelectric (TE) power factors (PF). Their electronic structure contains rich features, referred to as…
Low-dimensional semiconductors have been widely exploited in thermoelectric energy conversion for high efficiencies due to their suppressed lattice thermal conduction, sharply defined electronic density of states, and tunable…
The conventional notion for achieving high efficiency in thermophotovoltaics (TPVs) is to use a monochromatic emission at a photon energy corresponding to the band gap of the cell. Here, we prove theoretically that such a notion is only…
Introducing hierarchical disorder from multiple defects into materials through nanostructuring is one of the most promising directions to achieve extremely low thermal conductivities and thus improve thermoelectric performance. The success…
Embedding nanostructures within a bulk matrix is an important practical approach towards the electronic engineering of high performance thermoelectric systems. For power generation applications, it ideally combines the efficiency benefit…