2025 Roadmap Toward Sustainable Thermoelectrics

Abstract

Thermoelectric technology uses the Seebeck effect to directly convert heat into electricity or vice versa. Amongst its advantages are the lack of moving parts, reliability, absence of refrigerant gasses and scalability. To date, commercial progress has been limited due to relatively low conversion efficiencies and high costs. However, with increasing energy costs, the advent of the Internet of Things and its needs to power many sensors, and the need for thermal management in electronics, there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future of thermoelectric energy conversion. Beyond using abundant elements, sustainability has so far not been a major consideration in the development of thermoelectric technology, with its understandable emphasis on improving performance. However, sustainability aspects, including eco-friendly processing, resource efficient module fabrication, ensuring a long working life and end of life recycling should all be major considerations from the outset. This roadmap aims to provide an overview of current efforts moving towards sustainable thermoelectrics as well as guidance for future work. In terms of organisation, the roadmap contains cross-cutting sections on aspects of sustainability and sections focused on the major thermoelectric materials. It can be read front to back or focusing on chapters of particular interest. We hope that this roadmap will stimulate new research, leading to the early adoption of sustainability concepts, beyond using abundant elements, in the development of large-scale thermoelectric technology.

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