ABSTRACT
To increase the efficiency of energy harvesting, technologies that can utilize weak thermal energies existing in environments are in demand; however, conventional technologies fail to realize this objective because energy accumulation does not occur in them. Herein we propose a metamaterial thermoelectric conversion by which thermal energy can be accumulated from the surrounding environment and can be converted into electricity. A metamaterial absorber (MA) can create an anisotropic thermal distribution across an object by accumulating thermal energy from the environment. Using this technique, we fabricated a thermoelectric device that can produce electricity even in an environment with uniform thermal radiation and experimentally determined that a thermal gradient of 0.14 K on the device was created in an environment with uniform thermal radiation at 364 K. This technique will pave the way to utilize weak thermal energies existing anywhere to produce electricity.
