Thermoelectric generator based on a robust carbon nanotube/BiSbTe foam

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

27 pointsPaulHoule3 comments

The ZT (figure of merit) is an apples-to-apples number for comparing one thermoelectric material set to another. Higher is better.

Bismuth Telluride is the standard and has been for decades. It has a ZT of about 1.3. There have been some breakthroughs to exceed that in a few spots, but with limitations. Most of its competitors still exceed a ZT of 1.

This publication’s material is less than 0.01. Not all that newsworthy, unless I’m missing something.

Paper claims that the innovation of this category of materials is about manufacturability. Organic TEMs can be spray-on thin films and foams filled with cheap bulk powders, rather than growing inorganic planar semiconductors; The downsides have been that they're fragile and they aren't very good (by a factor of ~500 worse than inorganic semiconductor TEMs). They report on making them 5x better performance (so only 100x worse), and dramatically less fragile.

Presumably, this would have very different applications.

I think the idea is to use it for extremely low power "ambient computing" and for example wearables where the human provides the heat source (and which need to be flexible).

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