Symposium FK
Thermoelectrics: Materials Research and Application Technologies

This symposium, which follows a series of previous editions at CIMTEC, is focusing on research and development issues critical to the advancement of solid-state thermoelectric conversion technologies and their infusion into a significantly wider range of applications.
 
Since the mid 1980’s, significant research efforts have been devoted to the discovery, characterization and optimization of advanced thermoelectric materials. In spite of significant gains in the peak dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, when it comes to practical applications, it has proven extremely challenging to displace materials discovered in the 1950’s and 1960’s, namely Bi2Te3 and its alloys, PbTe and its alloys, and Si-Ge alloys. Bi2Te3 alloys remain the only commercial-scale thermoelectric material that is used today for thermal management and low grade waste heat power applications. For power generation, there are several reasons for this situation, but the main one being that a novel high performance thermoelectric material is but step one of a lengthy technology development lifecycle that must be successfully completed for enabling infusion into applications. For thermoelectric cooling, the main challenge has been to achieve significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art Bi2Te3 technology.

The symposium will be organized along three main thrusts: 1) Theoretical and experimental thermoelectric transport and materials research, including big data approaches for new materials discovery; 2)  Solid-state thermal-to-electric and direct energy conversion device research and modeling, including bulk materials and thin-film device architectures; 3) Converter technology research, development and infusion, including design, modeling, characterization, advanced processing and extended performance testing of device materials, elements, interfaces, and application-scale systems.