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12-02 :: February/March 2012
nanotimes News in Brief
Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science’s Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, in collaboration with scientists from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Uni- versity of Michigan, and the California Institute of Technology, have identified a new class of high- performance thermoelectric materials – materials that convert heat to electricity or vice versa.
“About 60 percent of the power we get from primary energy sources today goes to waste, mostly in the form of heat,” said Brookhaven physicist Qiang Li, leader of Brookhaven’s Advanced Energy Materials Group and a co-author on the paper. “If we can recover that waste heat as electricity, it would be a huge economic benefit.”
“Our approach of using liquid-like ions instead of a solid glass is a new strategy to decrease thermal conductivity below that of a glass,” said Li. “It not only reduces the ‘mean free path’ of lattice vibra- tions – how far these vibrations can travel – but also eliminates some of the vibrational modes com- pletely.”
The reduction in thermal conductivity results in a thermoelectric material with a “figure of merit” – a measure of its performance – that is among the highest for any bulk material, even at temperatures of 1,000 Kelvin (nearly 730° Celsius). That’s a hig- her operating temperature than bismuth-tellurium based thermoelectric materials used in limited applications today. And unlike those materials, the new copper-selenium material contains no rare- earth elements.
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Huili Liu, Xun Shi, Fangfang Xu, Linlin Zhang, Wenqing Zhang, Lidong Chen, Qiang Li, Ctirad Uher, Tristan Day & G. Jeffrey Snyder: Copper ion liquid-like thermo- electrics, In: Nature Materials AOP, March 11, 2012, DOI:10.1038/nmat3273: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat3273
Over the past few months three scientists at Nanosystems Initiative Munich in Germany recei- ved considerable grants of the European Research Council (ERC). Prof. Achim Hartschuh (LMU Mu- nich) was awarded the EUR1.5 million grant for the development of novel optical microscopy methods. Prof. Hermann E. Gaub (LMU Munich) received an Advanced Grant of EUR2.5 million. The amount is intended for the research project on “Designer Cellulosomes by Single Molecule Cut & Paste”.