Abstract
Thermoelectric (TE) materials have been of great importance for the capability of direct energy conversion between heat and electricity. In the past decades, people have developed various methods to enhance the performance of the TE materials, which is characterized in terms of the dimensionless figure of merit of zT. Combined with the advanced techniques of printing, the printable and flexible TE materials have been obtained, which can greatly broaden the application of the TE materials, thus improve the overall energy conversion efficiency. Most importantly, the flexible high performance TE materials-based device can reduce the consume of unrecoverable resources. In this review, we would like to discuss the strategies of enhancing the performance of TE materials in details. Then, the advanced techniques of printing of TE materials-based device will be involved. Finally, we would suggest some promising methods to enhance the thermoelectric properties of TE materials and the potential applications in future.
Highlights
The world has been demanding more and more electricity by burning fossil fuels, which put both human beings and natural systems at stake
Some other works have demonstrated that by the technique of thermoelectric painting, people can achieve the shape-engineering of high-performance TE materials (Sun et al, 2014; Park et al, 2016)
The evolution history of the TE materials has witnessed two major leaps. One of such advances is inspired by doping of semiconductors and other alloying methods, while the other one is related to the application of thermoelectric field (Goldsmid and Douglas, 1954; Joffe et al, 1956; Hicks and Dresselhaus, 1993)
Summary
Reviewed by: Yang Yang, University of Southern California, United States Xiang Qi, Xiangtan University, China. Thermoelectric (TE) materials have been of great importance for the capability of direct energy conversion between heat and electricity. Combined with the advanced techniques of printing, the printable and flexible TE materials have been obtained, which can greatly broaden the application of the TE materials, improve the overall energy conversion efficiency. The flexible high performance TE materials-based device can reduce the consume of unrecoverable resources. We would like to discuss the strategies of enhancing the performance of TE materials. The advanced techniques of printing of TE materials-based device will be involved. We would suggest some promising materials to enhance the thermoelectric performance and the potential applications in future
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