Conductive PEDOT: PSS-Based Organic/Inorganic Flexible Thermoelectric Films and Power Generators.

Dabin Park,Minsu Kim,Jooheon Kim

doi:10.3390/polym13020210

Abstract

We present a simple thermoelectric device that consists of a conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS)-based inorganic/organic thermoelectric film with high thermoelectric performance. The PEDOT:PSS-coated Se NWs were first chemically synthesized in situ, and then mixed with an Ag precursor solution to produce the PEDOT:PSS-coated Ag2Se NWs. The PEDOT:PSS matrix was then treated with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) prior to the production of flexible PEDOT:PSS-coated Ag2Se NW/PEDOT:PSS composite films with various weight fractions of Ag2Se via a simple drop-casting method. The thermoelectric properties (Seebeck coefficient, electrical conductivity, and power factor) of the composite films were then analyzed. The composite film with 50 wt.% NWs exhibited the highest power factor of 327.15 μW/m·K2 at room temperature. The excellent flexibility of this composite film was verified by bending tests, in which the thermoelectric properties were reduced by only ~5.9% after 1000 bending cycles. Finally, a simple thermoelectric device consisting of five strips of the proposed composite film was constructed and was shown to generate a voltage of 7.6 mV when the temperature difference was 20 K. Thus, the present study demonstrates that that the combination of a chalcogenide and a conductive composite film can produce a high-performance flexible thermoelectric composite film.

Highlights

Due to continuing global concerns about environmental pollution and the sustainability of energy generation, the identification and exploitation of new clean energy resources is vital
Thermoelectric (TE) devices have demonstrated significant potential for use in energy harvesting based on their conversion of thermal energy to electrical energy via the movement of charge carriers and internal phonons [1,2,3,4,5,6]
In the development of these devices, the TE performance of a prospective material is calculated using the dimensionless figure of merit (ZT), given by the formula in Equation (1): tral with regard to jurisdictional clai

Summary

Introduction

Due to continuing global concerns about environmental pollution and the sustainability of energy generation, the identification and exploitation of new clean energy resources is vital. The recent research on high-performance TE devices has focused primarily on inorganic materials such as oxides (e.g., NaCo2 O4 , SrTiO3 , and CaMnO3 ) [7,8,9,10], in particular bulk materials (e.g., lead antimony silver telluride) [11,12], and Te-based semiconductors (e.g., Bi2 Te3 , Sb2 Te3 , and PbTe) [13,14,15,16,17,18,19] Conductive polymers such as polypyrrole (PPy) [20,21], polythiophene (PTh) [22,23], and polyaniline (PANI) [24,25] have been used as alternatives to the aforementioned inorganic TE materials due to their environmentally friendly nature, ease of processing, and low raw material costs. Wang et al [26] fabricated PPy/graphene/PANI ternary nanocomposites and achieved an outstanding power factor of ~52.5 μW/m·K2 , which is much larger than that of the pristine

Methods

Results

Conclusion