Tomorrow’s Solid-State Air Conditioners and Refrigerators
Driving this research breakthrough is the idea of intentionally contaminating, or doping, nanostructured thermoelectric materials with barely-there amounts of sulfur. The doped materials are obtained by cooking the material and the dopant together for few minutes in a store-bought $40 microwave oven. The resulting powder is formed into pea-sized pellets by applying heat and pressure in a way that preserves the properties endowed by the nanostructuring and the doping. These pellets exhibit properties better than the hard-to-make thermoelectric materials currently available in the marketplace. Additionally, this new method for creating the doped pellets is much faster, easier, and cheaper than conventional methods of making thermoelectric materials.
“This is not a one-off discovery. Rather, we have developed and demonstrated a new way to create a whole new class of doped thermoelectric materials with superior properties,” said Ramanath, a faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer. “Our findings truly hold the potential to transform the technology landscape of refrigeration and make a real impact on our lives.”
Results of the study are detailed in the Nature Materials paper “A new class of doped nanobulk high figure of merit thermoelectrics by scalable bottom-up assembly.” See the paper online at: dx.doi.org