Advanced Functional Materials
Advanced Functional Materials
5 years ago

Toward High Thermoelectric Performance of Thiophene and Ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) Molecular Wires

Toward High Thermoelectric Performance of Thiophene and Ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) Molecular Wires
Qusiy Al-Galiby, Marjan Famili, Hatef Sadeghi, Iain M. Grace, Colin J. Lambert
The design of thermoelectric materials for the efficient conversion of waste heat into electricity requires simultaneous tuning of their electrical and thermal conductance. A comparative theoretical study of electron and phonon transport in thiophene and ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) based molecular wires is performed. It is shown that modifying thiophene by substituting ethylenedioxy enhances the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT for molecules of the same length. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the electrical conductance of EDOT-based wires decays more slowly with length than that of thiophene-based wires and that their thermal conductance is lower. The room-temperature ZT of undoped EDOT is found to be rather low. However, doping of EDOT by the electron acceptor tolunenesulfunate increases the Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductance, while decreasing the thermal conductance, leading to a thermoelectric figure of merit as high as ZT = 2.4. The thermoelectric performance of thiophene molecular wires can be enhanced by ethylenedioxy substitution, to yield ethylenedioxythiophene molecular wires, whose electrical conductance decays slowly with length and whose thermal conductance is reduced.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201703135

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