Recent Progress in Designing Thermoelectric Metal–Organic Frameworks

Thermoelectrics that enable direct heat-electricity conversion possess unique advantages for green and renewable energy revolution and have received rapidly growing attention in the past decade. Among various thermoelectric materials, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with intrinsic high porosity and tunable physical/chemical properties are emerging as a promising class of materials that have been demonstrated to exhibit many unique merits for thermoelectric applications. Their structural topologies and thermoelectric properties can be facilely regulated by precisely selecting and arranging metal centers and organic ligands. Besides, a large variety of guest molecules can be incorporated within their pores, giving rise to novel avenues of raising energy-conversion efficiency. This review focuses on the recent advances in designing conductive MOFs and MOF-based composites for thermoelectric applications. It first introduces the fundamental thermoelectric parameters and the underlying regulation mechanisms specifically effective for MOFs, then summarizes the related studies conducted in recent years, where the structural design strategies of tuning thermoelectric properties are demonstrated and discussed. In the final part, conclusions and perspectives with the envision of an outlook for this promising area are presented.