This is a static, unmaintained archive of the ITS website made December 2020 simply for historical interest. Please go to the current website at http://its.org for up to date information. Content and links here may be broken and will never get fixed.
Promoting thermoelectric technology to mitigate global climate change
Glen was already a giant when I first met him at GE in 1984. The year I was born he established isotope scattering as the main source of thermal resistance at low temperatures in Silicon. Isotope scattering is a special case of mass fluctuation scattering, without which we'd probably have no useful thermoelectric materials at all.
Slack, Glen A. "Effect of isotopes on low-temperature thermal conductivity." Physical Review 105, no. 3 (1957): 829.
Dr. Glen A Slack, a pioneer in the study of heat conduction in solids and the discovery and understanding of thermoelectric materials, passed away on June 27, 2019 at the age of 90.
Below is the obituary of Dr. Emil Skrabek (far left), one of the key technical people in the U.S. space nuclear program. As the obituary notes, Emil was involved in many of the U.S. space nuclear missions. He invented the thermoelectric material TAGS-85 that was used in the Pioneer-10/11 RTGs, Viking Lander-1/2 RTGs and currently in the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory RTG. He was smart, knowledgeable yet with a certain quiet humbleness and a clever sense of humor. He will be missed.
Gary
P.S. The acronym TAGS comes from the constituents of the thermoelectric material: tellurium, antimony, germanium, and silver.
We have learned of the passing of two colleques and long time contributors to the thermoelectric community Prof. Lev Bulat of St. Petersburg, Russia on June 12, 2016 and Dr. Grigoriy Arakelov of Moscow, Russia on June 7, 2016.
Katsushi Fukuda has informed us of the sudden passing of Kinichi Uemura on April 24, 2014 after a brief illness at the age of 91 in Japan. Prof. Uemura was well known to the thermoelectric community in Japan and around the world, serving on the International Thermoelectric Society board from 1992-4. He worked on thermoelectrics at Komatsu for many years and was a tireless advocate of the technology. He was modest, very professional, a scientist, an engineer and a teacher too.
Prof. Uemura first came to my attention as the organizer of the 12th International Conference on Thermoelectrics, ICT1993 and the 1993 Short Course on Thermoelectrics, SCT-93 (scanned PDF files of the lecture handouts are available online on this website.) ICT1993 was the first ITS conference to be organized in Asia and established the three year rotation (North America, Europe, Asia) preference used by ITS for selecting the ICT location up to the present day. ICT1993 also significantly raised the bar for the overall quality of the conference series, a standard that each ICT organizer strives to maintain.
After leaving Komatsu, Prof. Uemura remained active in thermoelectrics through the institute he founded, ITTJ, Institute for Thermoelectric Technologies Japan. He is survived by his daughter, Erico, and son, Hiroshi.
Dr. Glen A Slack, a pioneer in the study of heat conduction in solids and the discovery and understanding of thermoelectric materials, passed away on June 27, 2019 at the age of 90.
TO: Space Nuclear Community
October 31, 2013.html)
