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Advances in Thermoelectric Materials-Ⅱ
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Advances in Thermoelectric Materials-Ⅱ

A special issue of Materials (ISSN 1996-1944). This special issue belongs to the section "Electronic Materials".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 April 2023) | Viewed by 2896

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Yaniv Gelbstein

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Materials Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel
Interests: thermoelectrics; solid oxide fuel cells; metal hydrides
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, major efforts have been made in the development of novel and innovative materials and techniques for efficient, renewable, and environmentally friendly energy conversion into useful electricity. Thermodynamics, enabling the direct energy conversion of heat into electricity, is such a method. It was initiated by the discovery of the Seebeck effect back in 1821 by the German scientist Thomas Johann Seebeck. This was followed by the discovery of the Peltier effect by the French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier in 1834, and the later discovery of other related phenomena.

Since then and up to the late 1950s and early 1960s, various classes of novel narrow-gap semiconductors showing a high thermoelectric potential (PbTe (Ioffe), Bi2Te3 (Goldsmid), skutterudite (Dudkin), Mg2Si (Nikitin), etc.) were discovered which exhibited decent thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, and values of no more than 1 due to a large enough Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity and low enough lattice thermal conductivity values. Although these values were sufficient to develop practical thermoelectric power generators, including NASA's radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), their heat-to-electricity conversion efficiency was very limited. For this reason, the following years up to the late 1990s were dedicated to both the discovery of additional thermoelectric alloys and compounds, and to the electronic and lattice optimization of classic compositions for additional ZT enhancement. Since the 1990s, ZT values have continued to grow rapidly, up to values higher than 2, due to the implementation of both nano-structuring approaches for the minimization of the lattice thermal conductivity and of advanced electronic optimization methods for maximizing the thermoelectric power factor (i.e., the product of the Seebeck coefficient and the electrical conductivity). Yet, because not enough practical thermoelectric generators with equivalently enhanced conversion efficiency values are being reported, recent efforts have also been made toward the design and development of such highly efficient practical conversion devices.

This Special Issue is dedicated to recent advances in both theoretically and experimentally optimizing the ZT values of various material classes, as well as experimental and theoretical methods for approaching practical power generation devices.   

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit a manuscript for this Special Issue. Full papers, communications, and reviews are all welcome.

Prof. Dr. Yaniv Gelbstein
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Materials is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • thermoelectrics
  • energy conversion
  • narrow band-gap semiconductors
  • Seebeck
  • ZT

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

9 pages, 2780 KiB  
Article
High-ZT Due to the Influence of Copper in Ti(Ni1-xCux)Sn
by Yatir Sadia, Dan Lumbroso and Yaniv Gelbstein
Materials 2023, 16(5), 1902; https://doi.org/10.3390/ma16051902 - 25 Feb 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1353
Abstract
Most high-performance thermoelectric materials require either expensive, rare, or toxic elements. By doping TiNiSn, a low-cost, abundant thermoelectric compound, with copper as an n-type donor, some optimization can be performed for such materials. Ti(Ni1-xCux)Sn was synthesized by arc [...] Read more.
Most high-performance thermoelectric materials require either expensive, rare, or toxic elements. By doping TiNiSn, a low-cost, abundant thermoelectric compound, with copper as an n-type donor, some optimization can be performed for such materials. Ti(Ni1-xCux)Sn was synthesized by arc melting followed by heat treatment and hot pressing. The resulting material was analyzed for its phases using XRD and SEM and its transport properties. Cu undoped and 0.05/0.1% doped samples showed no additional phases in addition to the matrix half-Heusler phase, while the 1% copper doping initiated some Ti6Sn5 and Ti5Sn3 precipitation. The transport properties showed that copper acts as an n-type donor while also lowing the lattice thermal conductivity of the materials. the sample containing 0.1% copper showed the best figure of merit, ZT, with a maximal value of 0.75 and an average value of 0.5 through 325–750 K showing a 125% improvement over the undoped sample of TiNiSn. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Thermoelectric Materials-Ⅱ)
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12 pages, 2652 KiB  
Article
The Thermo-Mechanical Response of GeTe under Compression
by Gilad Mordechai Guttmann, Shmuel Samuha, Reuven Gertner, Barak Ostraich, Shlomo Haroush and Yaniv Gelbstein
Materials 2022, 15(17), 5970; https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15175970 - 29 Aug 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1142
Abstract
Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are devices capable of transforming heat energy into electricity and vice versa. Although TEGs are known and have been in use for around five decades, they are implemented in only a limited range of applications, mainly extraterrestrial applications. This is [...] Read more.
Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are devices capable of transforming heat energy into electricity and vice versa. Although TEGs are known and have been in use for around five decades, they are implemented in only a limited range of applications, mainly extraterrestrial applications. This is due to their low technical readiness level (TRL) for widespread use, which is only at levels of 3–5 approaching laboratory prototypes. One of the most setbacks in reaching higher TRL is the lack of understanding of the mechanical and thermo-mechanical properties of TE materials. Out of ~105,000 entries about TE materials only ~100 entries deal with mechanical properties, while only 3 deal with thermo-mechanical properties. GeTe-based alloys with varying other elements, forming efficient p-type thermoelectric materials in the 200 ÷ 500 °C temperature range, have been intensively researched since the 1960s and have been successfully applied in practical TEGs. Yet, their temperature-dependent mechanical properties were never reported, preventing the fulfillment of their potential in a wide variety of practical applications. The combined effects of temperature and mechanical compression of GeTe were explored in the current research by implementing novel quantitative crystallographic methods to statistically describe dislocation activity and modification of the micro-texture as inflecting by the testing conditions. It is suggested, through utilizing these methods, that the combined effect of compression and temperature leads to the dissolving of twin boundaries, which increases dislocation mobility and results in a brittle-to-ductile transition at ~0.45 of the homologous temperature. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Thermoelectric Materials-Ⅱ)
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