Transparent aluminium zinc oxide thin films with enhanced thermoelectric properties

Abstract

This work reports enhanced thermoelectric properties of transparent thin films. The influence of the composition, thickness and deposition method has been studied, reaching a ZT > 0.1 at room temperature.

Tuning nanoparticle size for enhanced functionality in perovskite thin films deposited by metal organic deposition

“…Impressive performance using a nanoengineering approach has been obtained in SrTiO 3 multilayers with added Nb nanoparticles. 7 Thin films oxides, such as hexagonal Al-ZnO, 8 perovskite RE 2-x Ce x CuO 4 (RE214) 2,9 and RE-doped Sr 3 Ti 2 O 7 , 10 have already demonstrated excellent thermoelectric properties even without the addition of NPs. Other materials, such as transparent delafossite CuAlO 2 , 11 have the potential to be used as thermoelectrics.…”

Review—Towards the Next Generation of Thermoelectric Materials: Tailoring Electronic and Phononic Properties of Nanomaterials

“…65 Actually, the study of the photoluminescence of these structures at high hydrostatic pressures from both the theoretical and the experimental point of view is a sign of their quantum confinement. 65 Other two-dimensional nanostructures studied in the framework of their thermoelectric performance were Cr/V 2 O 5 thin films (with ZT of 0.16 at room temperature 66 ), Al:ZnO sputtered thin films (with a ZT over 0.1, three times bigger than previously reported values 67 ), silicon thin layers and graphene membranes, both from the theoretical 28,40,68 and experimental 43 point of view.…”

Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer under Temperature Gradients and Conductive Transfer

“…However, for computational convenience and conceptual simplicity, we restrict our analysis to the regime of large grating periods, in which case it suffices to consider only the transfer between nearby objects. In the following, we take AZO as an illustrative example [48,49]. To begin with, we show that even in the absence of CR interplay, the RHT spectrum and spatial RHT distribution inside the nanorods differ significantly from those of AZO slabs of the same thickness.…”

“…For the purpose of generality, we show results under various doping concentrations {2, 6, 11}wt% (green, red, and black solid lines), corresponding to different SPP frequencies and bandwidths [49]. In particular, we consider a situation in which the boundary I of nanorod a is kept at T I = 800 K while the entire nanorod b is held at T b = 300 K (through contact with a room-temperature reservoir), and assume an AZO thermal conductivity of κ = 1 W/m · K [48]. The temperature along the x-y cross section is nearly uniform and therefore only shown in the case of 11 wt% (inset), a consequence of the faster heat diffusion associated with l << t. In all scenarios, the temperature gradient is significantly larger in the case of nanorods (solid lines) than for slabs (t → ∞, dashed lines), becoming nearly an order of magnitude larger in the case of 6 wt%, whose SPP frequency is much higher than the peak Planck wavelength at T = 800 K. More interestingly, we find that while slabs exhibit linear temperature profiles (since RHT is dominated by surface emission [50]), the bulk and delocalised nature of RHT in the case of nanorods leads to visibly nonlinear temperature distributions.…”