View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen Mary Research Online Thermoelectric Materials: a Brief Historic Survey from Metal Junctions and Inorganic Semiconductors to Organic Polymers Prospero J. Taroni,[a,d) Itziar Hoces,[b] Natalie Stingelin,[a] Martin Heeney,*[c] and Emiliano Bilotti *[d] Dadicated to the memory of Prof. Michael Bendikov and his many contributions to the field of organic electronics. a)Dept. of Materials and Centre for Plastic Electronics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK b) European Thermodynamics Ltd., 8 Priory Business Park, Wistow Road, Kibworth, Leiscestershire, LE8 ORX, UK c) Department of Chemistry and Centre for Plastic Electronics, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK –
[email protected] d) School of Engineering and Material Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, UK –
[email protected] ABSTRACT The use of thermoelectric technology is attractive in many potential applications, such as energy scavenging from waste heat. The basic principles for harvesting electricity from a temperature gradient were first discovered around 180 years ago, but the contemporary technology utilizing inorganic semiconductors was only developed since the early 1950s. The widespread use of this platform has so far been limited by a combination of relatively low efficiency in energy conversion or by issues related to the utilisation of rare, expensive and/or toxic elements that can be difficult to process. Recently much interest has been focused on the use of organic materials in thermoelectric devices, prompted by the possibility of developing large-area, low-cost devices.