Bottom-Up engineering of thermoelectric nanomaterials and devices

Heat waste in industry and transportation makes the efficient conversion of thermal energy to electricity by means of solid state thermoelectric devices extremely attractive. However, the cost-effectiveness of this technology is seriously hampered by the high production costs and the low efficiency of current thermoelectric materials and devices. In this sense, nanostructuration is an outstanding tool that helps in several ways to achieve materials with high thermoelectric performances. These nanomaterials, or nanocomposites, can be engineered with an unprecedented control over structural and chemical parameters at multiple length scales, by using a bottom-up approach. In this approach, nanocrystals (NCs) produced in solution become the building blocks of the final bulk-engineered materials. The key advantage of solution processing is that it enables a fine control of the size, shape and composition of the NCs, all of which impact the final thermoelectric efficiency of the nanocomposites.

In this talk, examples of this paradigm will be shown for materials based on Silver, Lead, Bismuth and Copper Chalcogenides, due to their intrinsic potential for thermoelectrics.