Highly flexible and excellent performance continuous carbon nanotube fibrous thermoelectric modules for diversified applications*

A highly flexible and continuous fibrous thermoelectric (TE) module with high-performance has been fabricated based on an ultra-long single-walled carbon nanotube fiber, which effectively avoids the drawbacks of traditional inorganic TE based modules. The maximum output power density of a 1-cm long fibrous TE module with 8 p–n pairs can reach to 3436 μW ⋅ cm −2 , the power per unit weight to 2034 μW ⋅ g −1 , at a steady-state temperature difference of 50 K. The continuous fibrous TE module is used to detect temperature change of a single point, which exhibits a good responsiveness and excellent stability. Because of its adjustability in length, the flexible fibrous TE module can satisfy the transformation of the temperature difference between two distant heat sources into electrical energy. Based on the signal of the as-fabricated TE module, a multi-region recognizer has been designed and demonstrated. The highly flexible and continuous fibrous TE module with excellent performance shows a great potential in diversified applications of TE generation, temperature detection, and position identification.