Abstract
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have attracted much attention in developing high-performance, low-cost, flexible thermoelectric (TE) materials because of their great electrical and mechanical properties. Theory predicts that one-dimensional semiconductors have natural advantages in TE fields. During the past few decades, remarkable progress has been achieved in both theory and experiments. What is more important is that CNTs have shown desirable features for either n-type or p-type TE properties through specific strategies. Up to now, CNT‒polymer hybrids have held the record for TE performance in organic materials, which means they can potentially be used in high-performance TE applications and flexible electronic devices. In this review, we intend to focus on the intrinsic TE properties of both n-type and p-type CNTs and effective TE enhanced strategies. Furthermore, the current trends for developing CNT-based and CNT‒polymer-based high TE performance organic materials are discussed, followed by an overview of the relevant electronic structure‒TE property relationship. Finally, models for evaluating the TE properties are provided and a few representative samples of CNT‒polymer composites with high TE performance are highlighted.
Highlights
Renewable green energy has gained growing attention since traditional fossil fuels are not renewable and their widespread use is causing more and more environmental issues [1,2,3,4].Thermoelectrics (TEs) is considered an important supplement to renewable green energies such as solar, wind and nuclear energy, etc. [5,6]
The results show that Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can achieve a high Seebeck coefficient over 300 μV/K
The results show that CNTs can achieve a high Seebeck coefficient over 300 μV/K at at 670 K after 20 s of Ar-plasma treatment [74]
Summary
Renewable green energy has gained growing attention since traditional fossil fuels are not renewable and their widespread use is causing more and more environmental issues [1,2,3,4]. The growth in number of publications per year about organic TE materials has been exponential in recent years (shown in Figure 1), which indicates growing interest in developing high TE performance organic materials in science and technology. Strategies for designing CNT-based high TE performance organic materials (CNT only and CNT hybrids) will be described after a brief introduction to the advantages of CNTs in thermoelectrics and an account of the history of and recent progress in both theory and experiments. Different from previous review papers, we would like to focus our attention on the intrinsic properties of CNTs in theory and experiments, and we intend to summarize and discuss the strategies that were used to improve the TE performance of CNT-based organic materials, such as tuning the carrier concentration, creating energy barriers, and making non-percolated nanostructures.
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