Abstract
Herein, a full thermoelectric (TE) device fabricated on textile using atomic layer deposition (ALD) and molecular layer deposition (MLD) thin‐film techniques is demonstrated. The device consists of n‐type ALD‐grown ZnO or ALD/MLD‐grown ZnO‐organic components and p‐type spray/immersion‐coated PEDOT:PSS components. Different fabrication strategies and device designs (vertical and longitudinal) are investigated. The performance is evaluated by measuring the open‐circuit voltage generated by the device over a range of temperature differences (between the hot and cold sides) up to 60 °C. At a fixed ΔT, the voltage generated is found to increase with increasing ZnO or ZnO‐organic film thickness. An attractive feature with both ALD and MLD is that the film grows in a conformal manner on the textile fibers so that the entire textile piece becomes an active part of the device, corresponding to a remarkable coating‐thickness increase. The voltage generated can also be increased by combining more TE pairs (even by just increasing the number of pairs by cutting the TE pads into smaller pieces). This research has thus proven the feasibility of ALD and MLD techniques in combination with a textile substrate in reinforcing the prospects of wearable thermoelectrics.
Highlights
We demonstrate the fabrication of flexible thin-film-coated textile-based thermoelectric devices; atomic layer deposition (ALD)-grown ZnO films and ALD/molecular layer deposition (MLD)-grown ZnO-hydroquinone (ZnO-HQ) SL films are used as n-type TE components and spin-coated PEDOT:PSS as the p-type component
The p-type PEDOT: PSS coatings were fabricated by either spraying or immersion as described in Section 4; it should be emphasized that efforts were made to standardize these intrinsically less reproducible procedures to avoid unnecessary thickness/quality variation
Devices Based on ZnO-HQ SLs In Figure 6, we show the performances of different devices fabricated using the ZnO-HQ SL thin films grown by ALD/MLD
Summary
We designed two types of device configurations, in which the temperature gradient across the thermoelectric materials is either longitudinal or vertical. We recently demonstrated for ALD/MLD-grown magnetic metal oxide–organic thin films that in particular such SL films with additional organic layers within the inorganic matrix are appreciably flexible.[48] we intentionally bent our TE textile devices while handling them, both before and in between the measurements, and found them durable enough. They were found highly stable in open air, showing no changes in their TE performance even after extended storage in air
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