Assembly Strategy and Performance Evaluation of Flexible Thermoelectric Devices

Abstract

Although organic and composite thermoelectric (TE) materials have witnessed explosive developments in the past five years, the research of flexible TE devices is rather limited. In particular, their assembly strategies and device performance reported in the literature cannot be directly compared, due to a variety of deviances including p‐ and n‐type component materials, shape and dimensions of p‐n flexible films, and applied temperature gradient (Δ T ). Here, three types of assembly strategies for flexible TE devices, that is, serial, folding, and stacking, are compared by fixing the corresponding experimental parameters. Furthermore, a convenient and general method to evaluate the flexible device performance (FDP) is put forward, that is, , where the maximum output power ( P max ) is divided by product mass ( m ), Δ T , and pair number of p‐n couples ( N ). The FDPs for the present serial, folding, and stacking devices are 11.13, 8.87, and 0.05 nW g −1 K −1 , respectively, confirming that the serial configuration is the best among the three strategies for flexible device fabrication. The preliminary evaluation method proposed herein will pave the way for a design strategy of flexible TE devices and speed up their applications in waste‐heat harvesting, e‐skin, wearable electronics, etc.

Stretchable fabric generates electric power from woven thermoelectric fibers

“…Despite the advances 5,6 in output power of flexible TEGs based on carbon nanotube (CNT), poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT), polyaniline, or bismuth telluride (BiTe based) in recent years, the technology still faces a significant challenge for use as a wearable power supply because a good matching between TE modules and effective thermal gradient direction is required. Conventional flexible TEGs are typically assembled by arranging, folding, or stacking serial sets of tiled films including a substrate 7 , which is essentially a flat, two-dimensional (2D) architecture that merely harvests the thermal energy in the in-plane direction but poorly fit to the perpendicular temperature gradient formed between the human body and the environment. Such architecture will not work effectively as a wearable thermal harvester.…”

Facile preparation of air-stable n-type thermoelectric single-wall carbon nanotube films with anionic surfactants

“…These materials have high flexibility, and the material cost is lower than that of inorganic thermoelectric materials. In particular, single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) is a very promising material for thermoelectric devices, and other fields such as fuel cells, solar cells, and so on [22][23][24][25][26][27] . SWCNTs represent a unique 1D carbon allotrope with structural, electrical, and thermal properties that enable efficient thermoelectric energy conversion using the quantum-confinement effect [28][29][30][31] .…”

Energy Applications of Magnetocaloric Materials

“…This is one reason why researchers are particularly focusing on solid‐state technologies; the most advanced and most commonly applied examples of these are thermoelectrics, which exploit the Seebeck effect . Recent advances along this line include the development of new materials and fabrication methods, the development of flexible modules, and thermoelectric nanogenerators . Thermoelectric technology systems do not have moving parts, operate over different temperature ranges, and the flexibility of the utilized modules enables a broad variety of applications.…”