Newsletter n°12 – February 2024

The directors and the members of the GIS Scientific Advisory Board wish you a happy 2024.

GIS NEWS

JNTE 2023

The Journées Nationales de Thermoélectricité 2023 took place from 22 to 24 November 2023 on the Université Paris-Saclay campus, organised by the Institut de Chimie Moléculaire et des Matériaux d’Orsay (ICMMO), the Centre de Nanosciences et Nanotechnologies (C2N), and the Laboratoire des Solides Irradiés (LSI). The event brought together 55 participants from all the French laboratories in the field. Find out more on this page.

The event concluded with the award of the 2023 Bernard Coqblin thesis prize to Hugo Bouteiller, who carried out his thesis work at the CRISMAT laboratory in Caen. Hugo was rewarded for his work entitled “Thermoelectric chalcogenides and antimonides for applications at very high temperatures”, which focused on the study of various chalcogenide compounds for thermoelectric applications in electricity generation (link to his thesis). This year’s thesis prize was sponsored by Moïz (Grenoble).

Applications for the Bernard Coqblin 2024 Thesis Prize

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

To apply for the Coqblin 2024 prize, the thesis must have been defended between 01/10/2023 and 30/09/2024. The application must include an extended CV (CV + list of publications + summary of thesis work), the thesis defence report and the thesis manuscript in pdf format. The applications will be examined by a committee of specialists from outside the GIS TE. The prize will be awarded and the winner’s work presented at the next Journées Nationales de Thermoélectricité, to be held this year in Strasbourg in November. Applications should be sent to Christophe Candolfi (christophe candolfi (at) mines-nancy.univ-lorraine.fr).

Please feel free to pass this announcement on to young PhDs in your teams and to students who will soon be submitting their thesis in this field!

Announcements

 Journées nationales de ThermoElectricité 2024 from 20 to 22 November

The Journées Nationales de Thermoélectricité 2024 will be organised by Laure Biniek of the Institut Charles Sadron (CNRS – UPR22) in Strasbourg (23 rue du Loess, BP 84047, 67034 Strasbourg Cedex 2).

The JNTE 2024 will consist of (i) two half-day thematic training sessions and (ii) two half-day scientific symposia. A 100-seat amphitheatre will be available for the half-day training sessions and the conference. 

The JNTE2024 website will be available shortly.

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

Webinars

Webinars will be organised from this year onwards and will be given by French or international personalities. They will last no longer than 1 hour (40 minutes of presentation and 20 minutes of questions/discussion). We will get back to you very shortly to let you know the date and theme of the first webinar, which should take place in April..

Upcoming conferences

The 20th European Thermoelectricity Conference ECT 2024 and the 40th International Thermoelectricity Conference ICT 2024 will be held in Krakow (Poland) from 30 June to 4 July. The deadline for registration at the reduced rate is 31 March. Full details are available on the ECT/ICT 2024 website.

The Institut Jean Lamour (IJL) in Nancy’s bid to organise the European Conference on Thermoelectricity (ECT) in 2025 has been accepted by the board of the European Thermoelectricity Society (ETS) in 2023. The conference will take place from 08 to 12 September 2025. Further details will be announced later this year.

Summaries of recent publications in thermoelectricity

This section presents summaries of publications extracted from the world’s scientific production in thermoelectricity over the previous 6 – 12 months. These summaries have been written by members of the GIS Scientific Advisory Board. The aim is to draw your attention to results considered by these members of the Scientific Advisory Board to be “outstanding” in the field. To avoid any confusion, please note that the authors of these summaries are not the authors of these publications!


Theme : Materials

Chemical stability of Mg3Sb2-xBix

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

The thermal and chemical stability of thermoelectric compounds is essential for various applications. In addition to the affinity of chemical species for oxygen, humidity can also be deleterious for certain compounds. Wu et al [1] recently studied the stability of Mg3Sb2-xBix (0 < x < 2) compounds at room temperature as a function of time when the samples were in air or immersed in water. These compounds have received particular attention in recent years due to their good thermoelectric performance at high temperatures in n-type samples obtained by combining the substitution of Sb by Bi and introducing an excess of Mg during the synthesis in order to counterbalance the Mg vacancies, the presence of which leads to electrical conduction by holes. These authors have shown that these compounds react with oxygen in the air and with water to form amorphous magnesium oxide phases. The resulting loss of Mg deteriorates thermoelectric performance and can be accompanied by a transition from n-type to p-type, depending on the composition of the sample. The higher the Bi concentration, the more sensitive they are to air and water.  A dense pellet of the compound Mg3Bi2 was completely decomposed after 99 and 12 days in air and water respectively (see the videos accompanying the manuscript on the publication website, which show the accelerated reaction of the samples). These results show the importance of this type of study, which provides relevant information on the real potential of new compounds for applications, including at room temperature. 

[1] X. Wu et coll., « Revealing the Chemical Instability of Mg3Sb2−xBix‐Based Thermoelectric Materials», ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2023), https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.3c12290.

This section was automatically generated from bibliographic alerts. Our Google Scholar-based article detection (over the period 07/02/2023 to 01/15/2023) may sometimes encounter issues with some publishers.

Materials

Theory

Low dimentionality

Systems