Brief description

Brief description

Thermoelectric (TE) technology exploits the ability of certain materials for direct and reversible conversion of thermal energy into electricity. This double edge ability gives TE technology a strong appeal in many energy generation and cooling applications. TE energy generators contain no moving parts and are completely silent. Such generators have been used reliably for over 30 years of maintenance-free operation in deep space explorations. These explorations require a reliable power supply for the scientific and research equipment on board of space vehicles. The power supply can only be provided by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTEG’s), which use nuclear heat sources. The future explorations require RTEG’s having significant improvements in reliability (degradation < 22%), specific power by a factor of ~2-3, and TE efficiency by a factor of ~1.5-2.5 over the already used RTEG’s in the space missions since 1961 until nowadays.

In this project, we will use our recently introduced guidance idea and the concept of band structure engineering in order to search for oxide and silicide materials with high TE efficiency as future TE materials for the next generation RTEG’s. These materials should possess intrinsically very anisotropic flat-and-dispersive electronic bands generated by highly-directional d or d-p electronic states. This high degree of band anisotropy confers the possibility to achieve low-dimensional electronic transport in bulk materials similar to that achieved in nanostructures. Employing complementary rational methods for fabrication, characterization and optimization of the theoretically predicted high performance TE materials, we will fabricate thin films and TE thermocouples based on these materials, characterize, and validate the high performance TE materials.