Reverse Engineering Materials For More Efficient Heating And Cooling

Provided by Catherine Meyers, American Institute of Physics

A new way to calculate the electrical properties of individual components of composite materials could open a path toward more energy-efficient medical refrigerators, air-conditioned car seats and more

If you’ve ever gone for a spin in a luxury car and felt your back being warmed or cooled by a seat-based climate control system, then you’ve likely experienced the benefits of a class of materials called thermoelectrics. Thermoelectric materials convert heat into electricity, and vice versa, and they have many advantages over more traditional heating and cooling systems.

Recently, researchers have observed that the performance of some thermoelectric materials can be improved by combining different solid phases — more than one material intermixed like the clumps of fat and meat in a slice of salami. The observations offer the tantalizing prospect of significantly boosting thermoelectrics’ energy efficiency, but scientists still lack the tools to fully understand how the bulk properties arise out of combinations of solid phases.

Now a research team based at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has developed a new way to analyze the electrical properties of thermoelectrics that have two or more solid phases. The new technique could help researchers better understand multi-phase thermoelectric properties – and offer pointers on how to design new materials to get the best properties.

The team describes their new technique in a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

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