Ren Zhifeng (right), director of the Superconductivity Center at Texas University and Mao Jun, a postdoctoral researcher, said that a new type of thermoelectric refrigeration material has low production costs and high efficiency at room temperature.
Was your steering wheel too hot this summer to touch it? A new type of thermoelectric material published in Science may help.
Due to the lack of cheap and efficient materials at room temperature, the widespread adoption of thermoelectric devices that can directly convert electrical energy into thermal energy for cooling and heating has been partially hindered.
Now, researchers from the University of Houston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that they have discovered a new material that works very efficiently at room temperature and requires little expensive tellurium, which is currently the most advanced material The main ingredient.
The job described in a paper published online, by Science Thursday, July 18, has the potential to apply to keep electronic devices, vehicles and other components overheated, said Feng Ren, the work of the corresponding author and the director of the Texas Superconducting Center, he Anderson is also a professor of physics.
"We have produced a new material, which is cheap, but the performance is almost as good as traditional, more expensive materials," Ren said. The researchers say that future work may narrow the subtle performance gap between their new and traditional materials, which is a bismuth-tellurium alloy.
The working principle of thermoelectric materials is to use heat flow from a hotter area to a cooler area. The thermoelectric cooling module works according to the Peltier effect, which describes the heat transfer between two electrical contacts.
Thermoelectric materials can also be used to convert waste heat from power plants, automobile exhaust pipes, and other sources into electrical energy. There are reportedly many new materials for this application, which require materials to work at higher temperatures.
Thermoelectric cooling modules face huge challenges because they must work at lower temperatures, and the thermoelectric performance index (ZT) is lower because it depends on temperature. Quality score is an indicator used to measure the working efficiency of thermoelectric materials.
Despite the challenges, at least the thermoelectric cooling modules currently have greater commercial potential, in part because they can operate at lower temperatures for long periods of time; cogeneration is due to the high temperatures (including oxidation and thermal instability) of their operation Becomes complicated.
The thermoelectric refrigeration market is growing. The researchers wrote: "The global thermoelectric module market is worth about US $ 600 million in 2018 and is expected to reach about US $ 1.7 billion by 2027."
For decades, bismuth-tellurium alloys have been considered to be the best-performing thermal cooling materials, but researchers say the high cost of tellurium has limited its widespread use. Jun Mao, the paper ’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, said the cost has recently declined, but it is still around $ 50 per kilogram. In contrast, the price of magnesium, the main component of the new material, is about US $ 6 per kg.
In addition to Ren Hemao, other authors of this paper include Zhu Hangtian, Liu Zihang, and Qatar Amira Gamaji, all of whom are from the Department of Physics at Harvard University and Tsinghua University, and Ding Zhiwei from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT And Chen Gang.
They report that this new material is composed of magnesium and bismuth and is produced in a negatively charged n-type form, which is almost as effective as the traditional bismuth tellurium material. They said that coupled with the lower cost, it should expand the use of thermoelectric modules for cooling.
To make thermoelectric modules with this new material, the researchers combined it with the p-type positive charge carriers of traditional bismuth-tellurium alloys. Mao said this made them use only half the tellurium of most current modules.
He said that because the cost of materials accounts for about one-third of the cost of the equipment, the combined cost savings are sufficient.
The researchers report that this new material is more successful in maintaining electrical contact than most nanostructured materials.
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