Time Dependent Simulations of Thermoelectric Thin Films and Nanowires for Direct Determination of their Efficiency with COMSOL Multiphysics®

M. Muñoz Rojo[1], J. Jose Romero[1], D. Ramos[1], D. Borca-Tasciuc[2], T. Borca-Tasciuc[2], M. Martín Gonzalez[1]
[1]Instituto de Microelectrónica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
[2]Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute, Troy, New York, USA
Published in 2013

Thermoelectric materials are one of the most promising materials for future and nowadays energy harvesting devices, as they can convert heat into electricity and vice-versa. The efficiency of thermoelectric materials is related with the figure of merit, ZT. Our work deals with the determination of the parameters that affect the measurement of the ZT with the Harman technique and the best experimental conditions for this kind of measurements. As no commercial software exist for thermoelectricity simulations, we used the PDE interface in COMSOL Multiphysics®, where we introduced the time dependent thermoelectric equations, in combination with the laminar Heat Transfer Module.

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