Thermoelectric Materials for Waste Heat Recovery and Flexible Energy Harvesting
This community develops solid-state materials and devices that convert temperature differences directly into electricity, primarily to capture waste heat from industrial processes and to harvest body heat for wearable electronics.
The work centers on optimizing the "figure of merit" in inorganic compounds like bismuth telluride, tin selenide, and lead telluride, as well as organic polymers like PEDOT:PSS. Researchers focus on reducing lattice thermal conductivity through phonon engineering, nanostructuring, and doping to improve the Seebeck coefficient and power factor. A significant portion of the literature applies machine learning to accelerate the discovery of new compositions and to optimize device configurations, including thin films, flexible substrates, and porous structures for specific temperature ranges.
The community represents 12.0% of all tracked research on tellurium and 8.2% of research on bismuth, with 5,403 and 5,711 papers respectively. It also contributes 4.1% of antimony research and 2.7% of germanium research.
There are 39,344 papers in this community, published most frequently in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds, the Journal of Applied Physics, and the Journal of Electronic Materials.
Recent work includes extending the temperature range of tin selenide phases, optimizing non-contact generator performance, and developing nature-inspired wearable devices for body heat harvesting.