Coated glass fibers could reduce waste energy

摘要

Flexible glass fibers coated with fused PbTe nanocrystals act as thermoelectric materials that could conserve some of the nearly 60% of the energy that is generated or used in the United States that is lost as waste heat, according to Purdue University researchers. As reported in Nano Letters by Yue Wu and co-workers, glass fibers that were dipped in a PbTe solution containing only 5% Te and then annealed proved to be flexible enough to conform to complex shapes, while achieving an average figure of merit, ZT, of 0.75 at 400 K. Currently available thermoelectric materials, which have ZT ≤ 1, tend to be brittle and are, therefore, used in larger blocks. Also, because the PbTe coating thickness is only 300 nm in these experiments, much less of the thermoelectric material is needed for a given application.