Best thermoelectric efficiency of ever-explored materials

Byungki Ryu; Jaywan Chung; Masaya Kumagai; Tomoya Mato; Yuki Ando; Sakiko Gunji; Atsumi Tanaka; Dewi Yana; Masayuki Fujimoto; Yoji Imai; Yukari Katsura; SuDong Park

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.106494

Best thermoelectric efficiency of ever-explored materials

iScience. 2023 Mar 27;26(4):106494. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106494. eCollection 2023 Apr 21.

Authors

Byungki Ryu¹, Jaywan Chung¹, Masaya Kumagai^{2

3}, Tomoya Mato⁴, Yuki Ando⁴, Sakiko Gunji⁴, Atsumi Tanaka⁴, Dewi Yana⁴, Masayuki Fujimoto⁴, Yoji Imai⁴, Yukari Katsura^{2

4}, SuDong Park¹

Affiliations

¹ Energy Conversion Research Center, Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI), Changwon 51543, Republic of Korea.
² Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN, Tokyo 103-0027, Japan.
³ SAKURA Internet Research Center, SAKURA internet Inc., Osaka 530-0001, Japan.
⁴ Research and Services Division of Materials Data and Integrated System (MaDIS), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan.

Abstract

A thermoelectric device is a heat engine that directly converts heat into electricity. Many materials with a high figure of merit $Z T$ have been discovered in the anticipation of a high thermoelectric efficiency. However, there has been a lack of investigations on efficiency-based material evaluation, and little is known about the achievable limit of thermoelectric efficiency. Here, we report the highest thermoelectric efficiency using 12,645 published materials. The 97,841,810 thermoelectric efficiencies are calculated using 808,610 device configurations under various heat-source temperatures ( $T_{h}$ ) when the cold-side temperature is 300 K, solving one-dimensional thermoelectric integral equations with temperature-dependent thermoelectric properties. For infinite-cascade devices, a thermoelectric efficiency larger than 33% (≈⅓) is achievable when $T_{h}$ exceeds 1400 K. For single-stage devices, the best efficiency of 17.1% (≈1/6) is possible when $T_{h}$ is 860 K. Leg segmentation can overcome this limit, delivering a very high efficiency of 24% (≈1/4) when $T_{h}$ is 1100 K.

Keywords: Materials science; Thermal property.