ABSTRACT
Email: zhangqihao@student.sic.ac.cn 3 School of Material Science and Engineering, Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, Jingdezhen
333000, China. Email: wanjiang@dhu.edu.cn * Corresponding author: wanglj@dhu.edu.cn
Energy is universally recognized as the physical basis of human life as well as the necessary demand of social development. However, traditional non-renewable energy has become increasingly exhausted with the ongoing of human consumption and the industrial activities, of which the discovered oil reserves, as is predicted, can only last for another 50 years at the current consumption rate. Exploitation of advanced, cleaner, more sustainable energy sources and improvement of the existing energy effi ciency, therefore, are imminent. Among all viable technologies for addressing this issue, thermoelectric (TE) energy converters that can easily achieve the mutual conversion between thermal energy and electric energy have attracted increasing attention as promising alternative environmental friendly applications. This is because they have advantages of solid-state operation, no mechanical moving parts, no releasing of greenhouse gases, compact in size, light in weight, being powered by direct current, being silent, reliable, and versatile (Rowe 1995, Rowe 2006). The solid-state TE devices can transform heat into electric power using the Seebeck effect and, conversely, change electrical energy into thermal energy for cooling or heating using the Peltier effect. This has been utilized or is at the trial stage in fi elds like military, aerospace, industrial, transportation tools, medical services, electronic, detecting temperature and measuring facilities, meeting the demand for energy conservation and environment protection (Snyder and Toberer 2008).
