Tuning phonon transport spectrum for better thermoelectric materials

Takuma Hori; Junichiro Shiomi

doi:10.1080/14686996.2018.1548884

Tuning phonon transport spectrum for better thermoelectric materials

Sci Technol Adv Mater. 2018 Dec 21;20(1):10-25. doi: 10.1080/14686996.2018.1548884. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Takuma Hori¹, Junichiro Shiomi^{2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Noda, Japan.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
³ Center for Materials Research by Information Integration (CMI2), Research and Services Division of Materials Data and Integrated System (MaDIS), National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan.
⁴ CREST, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kawaguchi, Japan.

Abstract

The figure of merit of thermoelectric materials can be increased by suppressing the lattice thermal conductivity without degrading electrical properties. Phonons are the carriers for lattice thermal conduction, and their transport can be impeded by nanostructuring, owing to the recent progress in nanotechnology. The key question for further improvement of thermoelectric materials is how to realize ultimate structure with minimum lattice thermal conductivity. From spectral viewpoint, this means to impede transport of phonons in the entire spectral domain with noticeable contribution to lattice thermal conductivity that ranges in general from subterahertz to tens of terahertz in frequency. To this end, it is essential to know how the phonon transport varies with the length scale, morphology, and composition of nanostructures, and how effects of different nanostructures can be mutually adopted in view of the spectral domain. Here we review recent advances in analyzing such spectral impedance of phonon transport on the basis of various effects including alloy scattering, boundary scattering, and particle resonance.

Keywords: 102 Porous / Nanoporous / Nanostructured materials; 210 Thermoelectronics / Thermal transport / insulators; 402 Multi-scale modeling; 50 Energy Materials; Thermoelectric material; alloy scattering; lattice thermal conductivity; particle resonance; phonon transport; sintered nanostructure.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This paper was partially supported by the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology, ‘Scientific Innovation for Energy Harvesting Technology’ [JPMJCR16Q5].