Advanced materials for thermoelectric systems

This themed collection in RSC Advances aims to collect and compile research articles to showcase the recent key progress in studies related to thermoelectric systems, covering the design, enhancement, and application of all thermoelectric systems.

During submission, authors will be asked if they are submitting for a themed collection and should include the name of the themed collection. 

Thermoelectric materials have gathered huge interest for their ability to harvest and convert the waste heat into useful electrical energy. Thanks to their high cooling power density and the potential to be miniaturized and incorporated into chips, thermoelectric systems provide a compact all-solid-state solution for thermal management of advanced microelectronic/optoelectronic devices. In addition, thermoelectric systems may offer more opportunities to utilize renewable clean energies since there are abundant heat source around us, such as solar, geothermal, microwave irradiation, and so on. The past decades gave witness to the substantial achievement of thermoelectric research in view of innovative concepts, strategies to improve thermoelectric performance of conventional thermoelectric materials, and advanced materials systems.

Notably, although substantial progress has been made in the area of thermoelectric systems, there are still numerous challenges. Both engineering the existing thermoelectric materials need knowledge and techniques from different fields such as heat transfer, microelectronics, solid-state physics, synthetic chemistry and nanoscience.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Synthesis and characterization of novel thermoelectric materials
• Strategies to improve performance of traditional thermoelectric materials
• Thermoelectric systems for recovery industry waste heat
• Thermoelectric generators
• Thermoelectric cooling devices
• Electrolytes for thermoelectrical cells
• Thermal charging cells
• Thermal self-power devices