Design, fabrication, and characterization of lateral-structured Cu-Ni thermoelectric devices

This work reports a simple lateral-structured thermoelectric devices using copper (Cu) and nickel (Ni) thermolegs. The approach includes the usage of low cost photolithography and without the needs of Cu deposition, leading to much easier and faster fabrication. The lateral device structure has never been implemented into any Cu-Ni devices to date. Investigations on variating the thermoleg's width (w) and length (l) realizes 5.72 μW at optimized design, possessing w and l of 1000 μm and 20 mm respectively. Moreover, the lateral structure presented in this work has generated larger power by 2.79 improvement factor than the previous vertically-structured device.