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A7: Developments in measurement techniques and preparation methods

Review of recent advances in thermoelectric measurements

Kasper A. Borup1, Johannes de Boor2, Heng Wang3, Franck Gascoin, Eckhard Müller2, Bo B. Iversen1, G. Jeffrey Snyder3, 5
1 Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University2 Institute of Materials Research, German Aerospace Center3 Materials Science, California Institute of Technology4 Laboratoire CRISMAT UMR 6508 CNRS ENSICAEN5 ITMO University

A recent round-robin by Hsin Wang et al.1, 2 found a variation in measured figure of merit, zT, between different laboratories of 14% at room temperature and 21% at 475 K, further increasing with temperature. This seems discouraging when compared to advances in materials, where even a 20% increase in zT would have significant commercial impact. This illustrates the necessity of improving measurement techniques and characterizing the errors inherent to each method and implementation. Here, we start with a discussion of recent progress on common techniques used for measuring thermoelectric transport properties. Discussions for improving the data quality in Seebeck coefficient, electrical resistivity, and thermal conductivity (from flash diffusivity and heat capacity) measurements are given together with methods for identifying possible erroneous data.

1 H. Wang, et al., J. Electron. Mater. 42, 654 (2013).

2 H. Wang, et al., J. Electron. Mater. 42, 1073 (2013).