scholarly journals Anderson transition: a novel route to high thermoelectric performance

Author(s):  
Fabian Garmroudi ◽  
Michael Parzer ◽  
Alexander Riss ◽  
Andrei Ruban ◽  
Sergii Khmelevskyi ◽  
...  

Abstract Discovered exactly 200 years ago in 1821, thermoelectricity is nowadays of global interest as it allows to directly interconvert thermal and electrical energy via the Seebeck/Peltier effect, which could be exploited to enhance energy efficiency. In their seminal work, Mahan and Sofo mathematically derived the conditions for ’the best thermoelectric’ − a delta-distribution-shaped electronic transport function, where charge carriers contribute to transport only in an infinitely narrow energy interval. So far, however, only approximations to this concept were expected to really exist in nature. Here, we propose as a physical realisation of this scenario the Anderson transition in an impurity band, i.e. the transition from Anderson-localised to extended quantum states. We obtained a significant enhancement and dramatic change of the thermoelectric properties from p-type to n-type in the stoichiometric Heusler compound Fe2VAl, which we assign to a narrow region of delocalised electrons in the energy spectrum near the Fermi energy. We achieved this through an innovative approach of driving the Anderson transition via continuous disorder tuning: variable amounts of atomic defects are induced in a controlled fashion by thermal quenching from high temperatures (950 − 1380 °C). Based on our experimental electronic transport and magnetisation results, supported by Monte-Carlo and density functional theory calculations, we demonstrate a universal enhancement strategy towards colossal thermoelectric performance that is applicable to diverse material classes.

RSC Advances ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (46) ◽  
pp. 29112-29121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kratzer ◽  
Sherif Abdulkader Tawfik ◽  
Xiang Yuan Cui ◽  
Catherine Stampfl

Electronic transport in a zig-zag-edge graphene nanoribbon (GNR) and its modification by adsorbed transition metal porphyrins is studied by means of density functional theory calculations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seungjun Lee ◽  
Jeong-Pil Song ◽  
Seoung-Hun Kang ◽  
Young-Kyun Kwon

AbstractWe performed density functional theory calculations to investigate the thermoelectric properties of phosphorene oxide (PO) expected to form by spontaneous oxidation of phosphorene. Since thermoelectric features by nature arise from the consequences of the electron-phonon interaction, we computed the phonon-mediated electron relaxation time, which was fed into the semiclassical Boltzmann transport equation to be solved for various thermoelectric-related quantities. It was found that PO exhibits superior thermoelectric performance compared with its pristine counterpart, which has been proposed to be a candidate for the use of future thermoelectric applications. We revealed that spontaneous oxidation of phosphorene leads to a significant enhancement in the thermoelectric properties of n-doped phosphorene oxide, which is attributed to the considerable reduction of lattice thermal conductivity albeit a small decrease in electrical conductivity. Our results suggest that controlling oxidation may be utilized to improve thermoelectric performance in nanostructures, and PO can be a promising candidate for low-dimensional thermoelectric devices.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Wang ◽  
Sagar Udyavara ◽  
Matthew Neurock ◽  
C. Daniel Frisbie

<div> <div> <div> <p> </p><div> <div> <div> <p>Electrocatalytic activity for hydrogen evolution at monolayer MoS2 electrodes can be enhanced by the application of an electric field normal to the electrode plane. The electric field is produced by a gate electrode lying underneath the MoS2 and separated from it by a dielectric. Application of a voltage to the back-side gate electrode while sweeping the MoS2 electrochemical potential in a conventional manner in 0.5 M H2SO4 results in up to a 140-mV reduction in overpotential for hydrogen evolution at current densities of 50 mA/cm2. Tafel analysis indicates that the exchange current density is correspondingly improved by a factor of 4 to 0.1 mA/cm2 as gate voltage is increased. Density functional theory calculations support a mechanism in which the higher hydrogen evolution activity is caused by gate-induced electronic charge on Mo metal centers adjacent the S vacancies (the active sites), leading to enhanced Mo-H bond strengths. Overall, our findings indicate that the back-gated working electrode architecture is a convenient and versatile platform for investigating the connection between tunable electronic charge at active sites and overpotential for electrocatalytic processes on ultrathin electrode materials.</p></div></div></div><br><p></p></div></div></div>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodosios Famprikis ◽  
James Dawson ◽  
François Fauth ◽  
Emmanuelle Suard ◽  
Benoit Fleutot ◽  
...  

<div> <p>Solid electrolytes are crucial for next‑generation solid‑state batteries and Na<sub>3</sub>PS<sub>4</sub> is one of the most promising Na<sup>+</sup> conductors for such applications. At present, two phases of Na<sub>3</sub>PS<sub>4</sub> have been identified and it had been thought to melt above 500 °C. In contrast, we show that it remains solid above this temperature and transforms into a third polymorph, γ, exhibiting superionic behavior. We propose an orthorhombic crystal structure for γ‑Na<sub>3</sub>PS<sub>4</sub> based on scattering density analysis of diffraction data and density functional theory calculations. We show that the Na<sup>+</sup> superionic behavior is associated with rotational motion of the thiophosphate polyanions pointing to a rotor phase, based on <i>ab initio</i> molecular dynamics simulations and supported by high‑temperature synchrotron and neutron diffraction, thermal analysis and impedance spectroscopy. These findings are of importance for the development of new polyanion‑based solid electrolytes.</p> </div>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Harb ◽  
Lee Thompson ◽  
Hrant Hratchian

Lanthanide hydroxides are key species in a variety of catalytic processes and in the preparation of corresponding oxides. This work explores the fundamental structure and bonding of the simplest lanthanide hydroxide, LnOH (Ln=La-Lu), using density functional theory calculations. Interestingly, the calculations predict that all structures of this series will be linear. Furthermore, these results indicate a valence electron configuration featuring an occupied sigma orbital and two occupied pi orbitals for all LnOH compounds, suggesting that the lanthanide-hydroxide bond is best characterized as a covalent triple bond.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Harb ◽  
Lee Thompson ◽  
Hrant Hratchian

Lanthanide hydroxides are key species in a variety of catalytic processes and in the preparation of corresponding oxides. This work explores the fundamental structure and bonding of the simplest lanthanide hydroxide, LnOH (Ln=La-Lu), using density functional theory calculations. Interestingly, the calculations predict that all structures of this series will be linear. Furthermore, these results indicate a valence electron configuration featuring an occupied sigma orbital and two occupied pi orbitals for all LnOH compounds, suggesting that the lanthanide-hydroxide bond is best characterized as a covalent triple bond.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anshuman Kumar ◽  
Reinhard Schweitzer-Stenner ◽  
Bryan Wong

In this work, we carry out new time-dependent density functional theory calculations on the cationic tripeptide GAG in implicit and explicit water to determine the transitions that give rise to the observed CD signals of polyproline II and β-strand conformations. Our results reveal a plethora of electronic transitions that are governed by configurational interactions between multiple molecular orbital transitions of comparable energy. We also show that reproducing the CD spectra of polyproline II and β-strand conformations requires the explicit consideration of water molecules. The structure dependence of delocalized occupied orbitals contributes to the experimentally-observed invalidation of Flory’s isolated pair hypothesis.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anshuman Kumar ◽  
Reinhard Schweitzer-Stenner ◽  
Bryan Wong

In this work, we carry out new time-dependent density functional theory calculations on the cationic tripeptide GAG in implicit and explicit water to determine the transitions that give rise to the observed CD signals of polyproline II and β-strand conformations. Our results reveal a plethora of electronic transitions that are governed by configurational interactions between multiple molecular orbital transitions of comparable energy. We also show that reproducing the CD spectra of polyproline II and β-strand conformations requires the explicit consideration of water molecules. The structure dependence of delocalized occupied orbitals contributes to the experimentally-observed invalidation of Flory’s isolated pair hypothesis.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seoin Back ◽  
Kevin Tran ◽  
Zachary Ulissi

<div> <div> <div> <div><p>Developing active and stable oxygen evolution catalysts is a key to enabling various future energy technologies and the state-of-the-art catalyst is Ir-containing oxide materials. Understanding oxygen chemistry on oxide materials is significantly more complicated than studying transition metal catalysts for two reasons: the most stable surface coverage under reaction conditions is extremely important but difficult to understand without many detailed calculations, and there are many possible active sites and configurations on O* or OH* covered surfaces. We have developed an automated and high-throughput approach to solve this problem and predict OER overpotentials for arbitrary oxide surfaces. We demonstrate this for a number of previously-unstudied IrO2 and IrO3 polymorphs and their facets. We discovered that low index surfaces of IrO2 other than rutile (110) are more active than the most stable rutile (110), and we identified promising active sites of IrO2 and IrO3 that outperform rutile (110) by 0.2 V in theoretical overpotential. Based on findings from DFT calculations, we pro- vide catalyst design strategies to improve catalytic activity of Ir based catalysts and demonstrate a machine learning model capable of predicting surface coverages and site activity. This work highlights the importance of investigating unexplored chemical space to design promising catalysts.<br></p></div></div></div></div><div><div><div> </div> </div> </div>


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