Chapter 4 - Review of inorganic thermoelectric materials

Abstract

In 1950s the establishment of solid state physics opened up a systematic study on thermoelectric performance in narrow bandgap semiconductors, which has led an epoch-making discovery of a series of high-performance thermoelectric materials such as Bi2Te3 and its solid solutions, PbTe, and Si-Ge alloys. In the late 1990s, inspired by the concept of “phonon-glass electron-crystal,” a new category of thermoelectric compounds, namely, cage-structured compounds, has been discovered with particular advantages of independent (or partially independent) tunability of thermal and electrical transport properties. After entering the 21st century, with continuous efforts on comprehensive understanding on the electronic and thermal transports, thermoelectrics came into a new era with an explosive discovery of new thermoelectric materials and a leap forward in materials’ performance. This chapter gives an overview on the presentative inorganic thermoelectric materials focusing on expounding their electronic and thermal transport behavior and the optimization of thermoelectric performance from the perspective of structure manipulation.