Technology
Evaluating
the performance of a thermoelectric material is time-consuming because it is
necessary to create many samples with different electron concentrations and
evaluate the performance of each sample. A research team led by Hiromich Ohta,
an associate professor of Nagoya University, developed a new technology for the
evaluation of a thermoelectric material that converts thermal energy to
electric energy. The team members used strontium titanate for the thermoelectric
material to measure thermoelectric energy conversion capacity and found that the
structure of a field-effect transistor (EFT) is effective to the performance
evaluation.
They built
an EFT by evaporating a metallic electrode and a gate insulator on a strontium
titanate material. They measured the thickness and electron concentration of
the two-dimensional electron generated from strontium titanate simultaneously,
and successfully measured thermoelectric energy conversion capacity by
controlling the voltage on the gate terminal of the EFT. As a result of the
measurement, they found that thermoelectric energy conversion capacity
decreased initially, but it increased to about five times when the thickness of
the gas becomes as thin as in nanometers. The new technology shortens the time
for performance evaluation. At the same time, the research team expects the new
technology to lead to early discovery of a high-performance thermoelectric material.
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