Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, major efforts have been made in the development of novel and innovative materials and techniques for an efficient, renewable, and environmental friendly energy conversion into useful electricity. Thermodynamics, enabling the direct energy conversion of heat into electricity, is such a method. It was initiated by the discovery of the Seebeck effect back in 1821 by the German scientist Thomas Johann Seebeck, and was followed by the Peltier effect, discovered by the French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier in 1834, and the later discovery of other related phenomena.

Since then and up to the late 50s and early 60s of the 20^th century, various classes of novel narrow-gap semiconductors, showing a high thermoelectric potential, including PbTe (Ioffe), Bi₂Te₃ (Goldsmid), skutterudite (Dudkin), Mg₂Si (Nikitin), and more, were discovered, which exhibited decent thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, and values of no more than 1, due to a large enough Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity and low enough lattice thermal conductivity values. Although these values were sufficient to develop practical thermoelectric power generators, including NASA's radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), their heat to electricity conversion efficiency was very limited. For this reason, the following years up to the late 90s were dedicated to both the discovery of    additional thermoelectric alloys and compounds, as well as to electronic and lattice optimization of classic compositions for additional ZT enhancement. Since the 90s, ZT values have continued to grow rapidly, up to values higher than 2, due to the implementation of both nano-structuring approaches for the minimization of the lattice thermal conductivity and of advanced electronic optimization methods for maximizing the thermoelectric power factor (i.e., the product of the Seebeck coefficient and the electrical conductivity). Yet, due to the fact that not enough practical thermoelectric generators with equivalently enhanced conversion efficiency values are being reported, recent efforts have also been made toward the design and development of such highly efficient practical conversion devices.

This Special Issue is dedicated to recent advances in both theoretically and experimentally optimizing the ZT values of various materials' classes, as well as experimental and theoretical methods for approaching practical power generation devices.   

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit a manuscript for this Special Issue. Full papers, communications, and reviews are all welcome.

Prof. Dr. Yaniv Gelbstein
Guest Editor

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• thermoelectrics
• energy conversion
• narrow band-gap semiconductors