Thermoelectric Materials - New Directions and Approaches, Symposium Held in San Francisco, California, U.S.A. on March 31-April 3 1997

Abstract : Thermoelectric materials are utilized in a wide variety of applications related to solid-state refrigeration or small-scale power generation. Thermoelectric cooling is an environmentally friendly method of small-scale cooling in specific applications such as cooling computer chips and laser diodes. Thermoelectric materials are used in a wide range of applications from beverage coolers to power generation for deep-space probes such as the Voyager missions. Over the past thirty years, alloys based on the Bi-Te systems ((Bi(1-x)Sb(x))2 (Te(1-x)Se(x)3! and Si(1-x)Ge(x) systems have been extensively studied and optimized for their use as thermoelectric materials to perform a variety of solid-state thermoelectric refrigeration and power generation tasks. Despite this extensive investigation of the traditional thermoelectric materials, there is still a substantial need and room for improvement, and thus, entirely new classes of compounds will have to be investigated.