Recent prospect of thermoelectric materials

Thermoelectric materials have three effects: Seeback effect, Peliter effect and Thomson effect.

Thermoelectric material has many advantages: (1) It has compact size, light weight and no noise in work; (2) The temperature can be controlled within ±0.1℃;(3)There is no CFC used in the thermoelectric material, which can pollute the environment; (4) As heat source can be recycled and transformed into electric energy (save energy), it has long service life and is easy to control. Therefore, thermoelectric material is a kind of material with wide application prospect. At present, thermoelectric materials have been mainly used for thermoelectric generator (TEG) and thermoelectric cooler (TEC). But they are also used in the military, medical physics and some other aspects.

With the further research of thermoelectric material, its performance will be further improved and it will also become a new hotspot in the new material research field.The focus of the future research of thermoelectric materials is the following aspects:

1. Based on traditional semiconductor energy band theory and modern quantum theory, materials with different crystal structures are calculated the Seeback coefficient, electrical conductivity and thermal conductivity, so that the new thermoelectric materials with higher thermal figure of merit can be found in the bigger range.

2. Since based on the theoretical and experimental research, the microstructure and preparation process of material have effects on its thermoelectric performance, the thermoelectric performance can improved further.

3. Theoretical and experimental studies on the high performance materials should be done to achieve the stable high thermoelectric performance.

4. The study on preparation technology should be paid more attention on so that the industrialization of thermoelectric materials can be realized.

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