Newsletter n°11 – July 2023

The management and members of the GIS scientific council wish you a good summer break.

GIS news

IWT2023

The IWT2023 workshop (International Workshop on Thermoelectric Materials: from materials chemistry and physics to devices) took place from April 12 to 14, 2023 in Caen. This event aimed to bring together French and Japanese chemists, physicists, and theoreticians from the thermoelectric community. The workshop brought together 75 participants, including a delegation of 12 researchers from Japanese laboratories and around ten researchers in Europe. Three poster prizes were awarded to: Linda Abbassi (LINK, Japan), Sara Passuti (CRISMAT, Caen) and Razvan Burcea (Pprime, Poitiers).

Applications for the Bernard Coqblin thesis prize 2023

Each year, the GIS TE launches a new call for applications for the Bernard Coqblin thesis prize to reward the best thesis on the thermoelectric theme. The price is €500, sponsored by the Moïz company (Grenoble).

To apply for the 2023 Coqblin Prize, the thesis must have been defended between 05/1/2022 and 10/1/2023. The file must consist of an extended CV (CV + list of publications + summary of thesis work) and the thesis defense report. The examination of the files will be carried out by a committee of specialists external to the GIS TE. The award ceremony and presentation of the work of the winner will take place during the next National Thermoelectricity Days. Files should be sent to Christophe Candolfi (christophe candolfi (at) mines-nancy.univ-lorraine.fr).

Do not hesitate to forward this announcement to the young doctors in your teams and to the students who will soon defend their thesis in our field!

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  National ThermoElectricity Days 2023 from November 22 to 24, 2023

The 2023 National Thermoelectricity Days will be organized on the campus of Paris Saclay University, by David Bérardan (ICMMO), Nathalie Vast (LRI), Philippe Lecoeur and Jérôme Saint-Martin (C2N).

The JNTE 2023 will be structured around (i) two half-days of thematic training and (ii) two half-days of scientific conferences. The training sessions will take place from Wednesday November 22 afternoon to Thursday November 23 morning, the scientific conference from Thursday November 23 afternoon to Friday November 24 morning.

The JNTE website is available at: https://jnte2023.sciencesconf.org/ (it will be updated over the coming weeks, English version currently under construction).

Registration for training sessions and/or the scientific conference will be free but compulsory.

Thematic school of thermoelectricity

The thermoelectricity thematic school will take place from October 08 to 13 in La Bresse in the Vosges. The deadline to register is July 15. All information is available on the school website https://ecolete2023.sciencesconf.org. Only two days left to register!

Upcoming conferences

The 19th European Thermoelectricity Conference ECT 2023 will take place in Prague (Czech Republic) from September 17 to 21. It is still possible to register. All information is available on the ECT 2023 website.

Summaries of recent publications in thermoelectricity This section presents summaries of publications extracted from global scientific production in thermoelectricity over the previous 6 – 12 months. These summaries were written by members of the GIS scientific council (CS). The objective is to draw your attention to results deemed “significant” for the theme by these members of the SC. To avoid any confusion, it is specified that the authors of these summaries are not the authors of these publications!


Theme: Devices

Silver nanoparticles: A key to the thermoelectric modules of the future?

Author of the summary: C. Candolfi, Institut Jean Lamour, Nancy

The integration of optimized compounds into thermoelectric (TE) modules faces many challenges to make them efficient and reliable over long periods of time. Among these, bringing TE materials and metallic interconnections into contact is equally important and difficult. These contacts must meet numerous criteria: low electrical and thermal resistance, absence of unwanted chemical reactions and interdiffusion of elements between the TE materials and the other compounds forming the legs, and good mechanical stability. In order to validate all these criteria, diffusion barriers deposited on TE materials are generally associated with a solder serving as “glue” with the metallic interconnections. However, the possible choices for this solder turn out to be very limited: it must in fact remain stable at the temperature on the hot side of the device and the soldering temperature must remain lower than the maximum temperature that the TE materials can withstand so as not to degrade them during this step.

Yin et al. [1] recently proposed using Ag nanoparticles to overcome this problem. The brazing temperature (573 K) remains limited and the layer thus formed remains stable at more than 1000 K. These authors have shown that the devices obtained with different TE compounds (Bi2Te3, PbTe and half-Heusler) are stable while maintaining good performance. Although these results are promising, improvements still seem possible, particularly at the interfaces where temperature drops are observed due to differences in thermal conductivity between the different materials. This leads to a drop in the temperature difference experienced by the TE materials and therefore, to a reduction in the overall performance of the device. Finally, if diffusion barriers were also used by these authors, it remains to be demonstrated that Ag does not diffuse at high temperatures and that the interfaces remain sufficiently stable over time.

[1] L. Yin et coll., « Low-temperature sintering of Ag nanoparticles for high-performance thermoelectric module design », Nature Energy (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-023-01245-4.

This section was automatically generated from bibliographic alerts. Our article detection based on Google Scholar (over the period from 10/01/2023 to 01/07/2023) can sometimes encounter problems with certain publishers.

Materials

Theory

Low-dimension

Devices