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A Nanocomposite Approach: Lowering Thermal Conductivity of Si-Ge Thermoelectric Materials for Power Generation Applications

Dale Huang, Bao Yang and Thanh Tran

Solid-state thermoelectric power generation devices have many attractive features compared with other methods of power generation, such as long life, no moving parts, no emissions of toxic gases, light weight, low maintenance, and high reliability. The first part of this paper discusses the basic thermoelectric effects and their underlying physics, and the second part introduces nanostructured thermoelectric materials and their characteristics. Especially, the synthesis and characterization of two-component Si-Genanocomposites have been discussed in details. This nanostructured approach is easily scalable and can be used to enhance the dimensionless figure-of-merit ZT of thermoelectric materials resulting in a more efficient thermoelectric devices.