| About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
2022 TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition
|
| Symposium
|
Advanced Materials for Energy Conversion and Storage 2022
|
| Presentation Title |
Enhancing the Thermoelectric Performance of Si Using Energy Filtering
|
| Author(s) |
Aria Hosseini, Lorenzo Mangolini, Peter A. Greaney |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Peter A. Greaney |
| Abstract Scope |
Researchers have recently developed processes for synthesizing monolithic Si with improved ZT. These materials obtain enhanced ZT through a finely controlled array of secondary phase inclusions. In this work we present a semiclassical electron transport model that demonstrates that the ZT enhancement originates from enhancement of the thermopower due to the mechanism of electron energy filtering. The model is free of tuning parameters and takes as its only input the experimentally measured carrier concentration. Fermi’s golden rule is used to compute electron scattering interactions with nanoparticles. The model suggests that if the energy filtering mechanism can be tuned, significant further enhancements in ZT are available in the tails of the Fermi-dirac distribution of highly doped thermoelectrics. This hints at a new strategy for optimization of thermoelectrics that breaks materials engineers free from the traditional paradigm of engineering the fermi energy at the band edge. |
| Proceedings Inclusion? |
Planned: |
| Keywords |
Computational Materials Science & Engineering, Electronic Materials, Energy Conversion and Storage |