Novel thermoelectric materials development, existing and potential applications, and commercialization routes

Thermoelectrics (TE) are devices which can convert heat in the form of a temperature gradient into electricity, or alternatively generate and absorb heat when an electrical current is run through them. It was established in the 1950's that the effectiveness of a thermoelectric could approximately be described in terms of a dimensionless figure of merit ... being respectively the Seebeck coefficient, the electrical resistivity and the thermal conductivity of the material. Until recently, ZT1 was the best performance these materials could achieve. However, the field of thermoelectrics advanced rapidly in the five last years, leading to the first significant breakthroughs in this area in the past fifty years, with materials with ZT up to 3 being reported. It is therefore interesting to wonder what new applications and markets these improvements at the material level could lead to. The first section of this thesis is a review of the principles of TE technology, the current materials and their level of performance. The recent materials developments are also described.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Bertreau, Philippe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eugene Fitzgerald.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37374

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37374