Non-Linear Thermoelectric Devices with Surface-Disordered Nanowires

We reviewed some recent ideas to improve the efficiency and power output of thermoelectric nano-devices. We focused on two essentially independent aspects: (i) increasing the charge current by taking advantage of an interplay between the material and the thermodynamic parameters, which is only available in the non-linear regime; and (ii) decreasing the heat current by using nanowires with surface disorder, which helps excite localized phonons at random positions that can strongly scatter the propagating phonons carrying the thermal current.

Nanomaterials in Thermal Backup Current Sources

The current-voltage characteristics of thermal batteries with anodes based on lithium and its alloys, with cathodes made of iron or cobalt disulfides are presented. The electrolyte-melt is a thickened mixture of fluorides, lithium and potassium chlorides, pyrotechnic mixtures of iron, molybdenum, titanium nanopowders. It is shown that the use of a lithium-boron composite and a “thickened lithium” composite is promising as a material for anodes of high-energy thermal current sources, and for cathodes - a mixture based on synthetic iron disulfide.

A Simple Approach to Evaluate Near Field Thermal Radiation From Emitters With Layered Structures and Temperature Variations in One Direction

A simple analytical calculation scheme to determine near field radiation through decomposing an emission domain into lots of thin thermal current sheets is presented. Through finding the orthogonal modes of thermal current of each thin layer, the thin current sheets can be treated as radiation sources of electromagnetic waves with determined analytical solutions. The outgoing electromagnetic waves from each thin current sheets can be either in transverse electric (TE) or transverse magnetic (TM) modes depending on the orientations of the current in the thin current sheets with respect to the directions of amplitude modulations of the orthogonal modes. Electromagnetic waves arriving to a collection domain are related to the electromagnetic waves leaving from each thin current thermal sheet with transfer coefficients. Transfer coefficient for TE and TM waves can be determined analytically with transfer matrix method or scattering matrix methods. Compared with existing dyadic Green's function method, the new calculation scheme allows material and temperature variations along one direction of the emission domain based on determined analytical expressions of TE and TM waves leaving from each thin current sheets. The simple calculation scheme is especially useful in near field radiation of layered structures with different material such as hyperbolic material with negative refractive indices. With this new approach, we recovered analytical solutions of near field radiation between two semi-infinite domains with uniform temperature and derived closed form solution of near field radiation between two semi-infinite domains with temperature profiles with/without laminated structures.

Quantum Treatment of Inelastic Interactions for the Modeling of Nanowire Field-Effect Transistors

During the last decades, the Nonequilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) formalism has been proposed to develop nano-scaled device-simulation tools since it is especially convenient to deal with open device systems on a quantum-mechanical base and allows the treatment of inelastic scattering. In particular, it is able to account for inelastic effects on the electronic and thermal current, originating from the interactions of electron–phonon and phonon–phonon, respectively. However, the treatment of inelastic mechanisms within the NEGF framework usually relies on a numerically expensive scheme, implementing the self-consistent Born approximation (SCBA). In this article, we review an alternative approach, the so-called Lowest Order Approximation (LOA), which is realized by a rescaling technique and coupled with Padé approximants, to efficiently model inelastic scattering in nanostructures. Its main advantage is to provide a numerically efficient and physically meaningful quantum treatment of scattering processes. This approach is successfully applied to the three-dimensional (3D) atomistic quantum transport OMEN code to study the impact of electron–phonon and anharmonic phonon–phonon scattering in nanowire field-effect transistors. A reduction of the computational time by about ×6 for the electronic current and ×2 for the thermal current calculation is obtained. We also review the possibility to apply the first-order Richardson extrapolation to the Padé N/N − 1 sequence in order to accelerate the convergence of divergent LOA series. More in general, the reviewed approach shows the potentiality to significantly and systematically lighten the computational burden associated to the atomistic quantum simulations of dissipative transport in realistic 3D systems.