Poster Award for HZB-PhD student at European Conference on Thermoelectrics

Monika Raja Thulasimani is working on hybrid thermoelectrics at the Graduate School MatSec at HZB. During the European Conference on Thermoelectrics 2017 her poster contribution was selected for an award. The young scientist described a solution based synthesis in order to design more efficient thermoelectric materials.

“These materials can be produced by a simple aqueous synthesis that is inexpensive for mass production; in our case, we use a template-based approach, whereby hybrid composites consisting of nanostructured Te in a PEDOT:PSS matrix are used to form Ag2Te/PEDOT:PSS hybrid materials”, said Monika Raja Thulasimani. She used GI-XRD and TEM to characterize the morphology of different samples. Then, she compared the morphological results to the thermoelectric properties in order to gain insight into the structure-property relationships of these materials.

Thermoelectric materials exhibit the thermoelectric effect where thermal energy is directly converted into electrical potential resulting in motion of the charge carriers. Thermoelectrics have traditionally been used in applications such as automotive waste heat recovery, but emerging applications related to consumer electronics, optical materials, and local cooling in computers have been proposed, and we are interested in hybrid thermoelectric materials towards this end.