New low-cost thermoelectric material works at room temperature
Now researchers from the University of Houston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have reported the discovery of a new material that works efficiently at room temperature while requiring almost no costly tellurium, a major component of the current state-of-the-art material.
The work, described in a paper published online by Science Thursday, July 18, has potential applications for keeping electronic devices, vehicles and other components from overheating, said Zhifeng Ren, corresponding author on the work and director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, where he is also M.D. Anderson Professor of Physics.
“We have produced a new material, which is inexpensive but still performs almost as well as the traditional, more expensive material,” Ren said. The researchers say future work could close the slight performance gap between their new material and the traditional material, a bismuth-tellurium based alloy.