Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Recent Progress in Oxide Thermoelectric Materials: p-Type Ca 3 Co 4 O 9 and n-Type SrTiO 3 −

2008; American Chemical Society; Volume: 47; Issue: 19 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/ic800644x

1520-510X

Hiromichi Ohta, Kenji Sugiura, Kunihito Koumoto,

Thermal Expansion and Ionic Conductivity

Thermoelectric energy conversion technology to convert waste heat into electricity has received much attention. In addition, metal oxides have recently been considered as thermoelectric power generation materials that can operate at high temperatures on the basis of their potential advantages over heavy metallic alloys in chemical and thermal robustness. We have fabricated high-quality epitaxial films composed of oxide thermoelectric materials that are suitable for clarifying the intrinsic "real" properties. This review focuses on the thermoelectric properties of two representative oxide epitaxial films, p-type Ca 3Co 4O 9 and n-type SrTiO 3, which exhibit the best thermoelectric figures of merit, ZT (= S (2)sigma Tkappa (-1), S = Seebeck coefficient, sigma = electrical conductivity, kappa = thermal conductivity, and T = absolute temperature) among oxide thermoelectric materials reported to date. In addition, we introduce the recently discovered giant S of two-dimensional electrons confined within a unit cell layer thickness ( approximately 0.4 nm) of SrTiO 3.