Improving the performance of organic thermoelectrics

by Osnat Zapata, Nanostructured Materials for Optoelectronics and Energy Harvesting (NANOPTO) group, ICMAB-CSIC

Date: Friday, 26 March 2021
Time: 10 am
Venue: Online session from the ICMAB Meeting Room. Register here to attend by Zoom. 

Abstract: Mn the current Internet of Things (IoT) era, smart sensing-devices are changing much about the world we live in, from how we sense our surroundings to the way we spend energy. On-site power generators for such devices will be essential, especially if they are maintenance-free, flexible, cheap, printable, or even disposable. Organic thermoelectric materials — semiconductors that can transform heat into electricity at near-room temperature — can fulfill these characteristics. Nevertheless, there are still issues in the current state-of-the-art materials that need improvements, such as the thermoelectric performance, benchmarked by the dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT), and the thermoelectric stability under continuous thermal stress.

In this thesis, we aim to explore the interplay between microstructure and doping, and how they affect the parameters that govern the figure of merit as well as the thermoelectric stability. To address this task, we develop a high-throughput fabrication and characterization methodology for evaluating many samples.

Supervisor:

• Mariano Campoy-Quiles, NANOPTO group, ICMAB-CSIC

PhD Committee:

• President: Clara M Gómez, Universitat de València, Spain
• Secretary: Carmen Ocal García, Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona, ICMAB-CSIC, Spain
• Vocal: Simone Fabiano, Linköping University, Sweden

University: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
PhD Programme: Materials Science