nsfworkshopemergingopportunitiesofnanoscienceto.docVIP

NSF Workshop: Emerging Opportunities of Nanoscience to Energy Conversion and Storage Section 3: Nanoscience and Thermoelectric Energy by Alexis R. Abramson 3.1. The Problem Addressed Introduction Thermoelectric devices are especially attractive because they do not contain moving parts, they are environmentally benign, and they may be easily incorporated into technologies for heat removal or for energy conversion. Thermoelectric devices, however, currently have limited use in the marketplace, which is largely a result of their low efficiencies. One big question is whether nanoscience may offer the potential for improvement of these efficiencies. Conventional thermoelectric devices used for either heating/cooling or energy conversion are typically comprised of semiconductor alloys and are fabricated from pairs of elements made of dissimilar thermoelectric materials (n-type and p-type). The thermoelectric elements are connected electrically in series and thermally in parallel, and in principle the same device could be used as both power generator and heat pump. Figure 1 shows a schematic of a thermoelectric device. Thermoelectric refrigeration proceeds via the Peltier effect, whereby passing a current across a thermoelectric junction produces cooling. Similarly, imposing a temperature gradient takes advantage of the Seebeck effect, and current flow is generated, producing electrical power. The dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, a measure of a material’s thermoelectric efficiency, is given by , where S is the Seebeck coefficient, T is temperature, and ( and k are the electrical and thermal conductivity, respectively []. Even though clever manipulation of material properties may provide an opportunity for improving room temperature ZT, there has been limited progress to develop novel high performance thermoelectric materials. Nonetheless, promising research has demonstrated that thermoelectric performance can be significantly enhanced in low-dimens