Abstract
Organic thermoelectric (TE) materials can directly convert heat to electricity, and they are emerging as new materials for energy harvesting and cooling technologies. The performance of TE materials mainly depends on the properties of materials, including the Seebeck coefficient, electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and thermal stability. Traditional TE materials are mostly based on low-bandgap inorganic compounds, such as bismuth chalcogenide, lead telluride, and tin selenide, while organic materials as promising TE materials are attracting more and more attention because of their intrinsic advantages, including cost-effectiveness, easy processing, low density, low thermal conductivity, and high flexibility. However, to meet the requirements of practical applications, the performance of organic TE materials needs much improvement. A variety of efforts have been made to enhance the performance of organic TE materials, including the modification of molecular structure, and chemical or electrochemical doping. In this review, we summarize recent progress in organic TE materials, and discuss the feasible strategies for enhancing the properties of organic TE materials for future energy-harvesting applications.
Highlights
About 90% of the world’s power is produced by heat engines that use fossil combustion as energy sources
Of 0.09 μW·m−1 ·K−2, while the longer PPy nanotubes showed an electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, power factor (PF) at 9.81 S·cm−1, 17.68 μV·K−1, 0.31 μW·m−1 ·K−2, respectively. These results indicate that the longer length and smaller sizes of the PPy nanotubes were helpful for enhancing the electrical conductivity and the Seebeck coefficient, while size and length have less effects on thermal conductivity
The authors found that the Seebeck coefficient can keep unchanged within certain ranges of DMSO and PSS concentrations, while the electrical conductivity becomes the major factor for controlling the value of PF
Summary
About 90% of the world’s power is produced by heat engines that use fossil combustion as energy sources. TE materials utilize the temperature difference between the hot end and its surroundings to generate power [1], which can directly convert low-quality waste heat into the usable electric energy. TE devices are promising candidates for making full use of waste heat and solar thermal energy [3]. TE devices better TE performance and are higher stability compared with compounds, organic materials. Inorganic semiconductor materials suffer some inherent merit) reach disadvantages, as high as 2.6 [4,5,6]. The ideal temperature for most high performance inorganic materials are generally above degree, cannot meet the increasing demand for collecting degree, which cannot meet the increasing demand for collecting the waste heat generated at a materials generally above.
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