Nanostructured Thermoelectric Composites

Advances in thermoelectric materials are needed to broaden the application areas for these materials. Specifically, the figure of merit (ZT) for thermoelectrics must be increased. Some recent demonstrations show that nanoscale structures are the key to obtaining high ZT (>2). However, these superlattice structures are created one layer at a time, in expensive processes. In the Phase I effort, NanoLab proposes to develop a bulk analog of the superlattice structure, that retains the properties of the quantum dot superlattice structures. To accomplish this, NanoLab plans to synthesize nanoparticles of thermoelectric materials and incorporate them into a nanocomposite. We believe that we can create a large number of quantum confined structures (quantum dots) distributed within a semiconductor matrix will be a cost effective route to obtain high figure of merit (ZT). Even at today's costs, we can predict that the cost of a nanocomposite will be far less than a structure grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).