The panoscopic approach to high performance thermoelectrics

This review discusses recent developments and current research in high performance bulk thermoelectric materials, comprising nanostructuring, mesostructuring, band alignment, band engineering and synergistically defining key strategies for boosting the thermoelectric performance. To date, the dramatic enhancements in the figure of merit achieved in bulk thermoelectric materials have come either from the reduction in lattice thermal conductivity or improvement in power factors, or both of them. Here, we summarize these relationships between very large reduction of the lattice thermal conductivity with all-scale hierarchical architecturing, large enhanced Seebeck coefficients with intra-matrix electronic…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• UD
  U.S. Department of Energy
• NU
  Northwestern University
• OO
  Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
• BE
  Basic Energy Sciences
• EF
  Energy Frontier Research Centers