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 t's possible that one day all the cooling power of
a noisy, bulky household refrigerator will be available on a
small device that is lightweight and has no moving parts. And
the same device, when given a heat source like a car's exhaust
pipe, could be used to generate electricity.
 Such
thermoelectric devices already exist in consumer products like
plug-in auto beverage coolers, where energy efficiency is less
important than portability and low weight. The challenge facing
researchers is to find new materials that could bring the technology
to the next level in which the efficiency would rival that of
conventional coolants in air conditioners as well as refrigerators.
Also in the future might be miniature cooling devices directly
on computer chips.
"As we
increase the efficiency of thermoelectric devices, we create
another tool in the arsenal for choosing the most efficient way
to do things. You can think of some applications pretty quickly,
and others would come up once the technology is available,"
said Francis DiSalvo, professor of chemistry and chemical biology,
who is attempting to develop new thermoelectric materials. DiSalvo
described the status of research in the field in a recent issue
of Science.
In conventional
cooling devices, heat is carried away by a working fluid, such
as a chlorofluorocarbon, which involves the moving parts that
cause most equipment breakdowns, environmental damage and bulkiness.
In thermoelectric devices, the "working fluid" is electrical
current that runs through a junction between differently doped
semiconductors and pulls heat away from that junction, producing
cooling without any moving parts.
Current thermoelectric
materials operate at roughly 10 percent of Carnot efficiency,
the theoretical maximum allowed by the laws of thermodynamics,
compared with about 30 percent for an average household refrigerator.
The theory behind thermoelectric devices has been around for
more than 40 years, but current materials don't rival the efficiency
of compressor-based devices. "The theory is not specific
enough to say, 'If you could make this kind of material -- that
is, this composition with atoms in a particular crystalline arrangement
-- that will give you the high thermoelectric efficiency.' We
have to go find the materials by an empirical process, test them
one at a time and say, 'Is our understanding good enough that
we can predict from what we're learning today about what's the
next best thing to try to synthesize after that?'" DiSalvo
said.
The search,
funded by the US Office of Naval Research, is complex because,
according to DiSalvo, with the exception of designing organic
molecules based on carbon, the ability to predict the composition
and structure of materials made from three or more elements is
completely lacking. "For most of the elements in the periodic
table, we don't know what will happen when we put them together.
If we knew how to do that, then we could calculate from the structure
what the thermoelectric properties might be like. And the theory
is good enough now that the results would be fairly accurate,"
he said.
The search
is focused on uniform bulk materials, which can be prepared in
large amounts by traditional synthetic methods, and on compositionally
modulated films, which require expensive nanofabrication. Bulk
materials, the object of DiSalvo's research, primarily have applications
in large devices like home refrigeration and recovering power
from car heat exhaust, while modulated film research might be
applicable to niche markets like on-chip cooling.
Researchers
know they need a material with low thermal conductivity and high
electrical conductivity, which has led them to look at compounds
of heavy elements like lead, antimony, bismuth and tellurium.
"We have some compounds that looked promising based on platinum.
No way you're going to build devices like that out of platinum
-- way too expensive," DiSalvo said. But, he said, "if
we can do the proof of principle, then we're off and running;
we've got our foot in the door." 
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