Talk:Thermoelectric materials

This article is wrong
Why is MHD listed in this article as a form of thermoelectricity? It got nothing more to do with thermoelectricity than an electromechanical generator. It's not even solid state. Perhaps the person who added the list of supposed thermoelectric effects is not aware of the conventional usage of the term "thermoelectricity", but it's usually restricted to the Seebeck, Peltier, and Thomson effects (see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989STIN...8927079R). Thermionic devices are not thermoelectric. MHD devices are not thermoelectric. Just look at the ample scientific literature on the subject. Tarchon 17:25, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

zT or ZT?
The article alternates between referring to zT and ZT as the figure of merit. Is there a difference? I don't know enough about the field to fix this.Mrquantumphysics (talk)

Merge thermoelectric effect into here ?
... er, no! If anything was going to be merged, then thermoelectricity should be merged into the substantial article thermoelectric effect. However, there is nothing in thermoelectricity above that in thermoelectric effect, so it might as well be deleted. Nothing that is, other than a bit of idle speculation that some people use the term thermoelectricty wrongly to cover thermal methods of power generation, which are (or should be) covered in their own pages. NeilUK (talk) 12:59, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I'll go back on that rant a little. Should "Thermoelectricity" be a disambiguation page, as somebody typing it will mean either "Seebeck et al", or "MHD et al", two disctintcly different disciplines NeilUK (talk) 09:32, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

what about telling people something more simple like how much electrical energy can be produced from heat with these materials much like is done on Wiki's solar page. For example, how much electricity could be produced by putting such materials around an automobile engine? just a layperson's comment after reading this tech review article http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20448/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.186.8.11 (talk) 09:48, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

The pages with names [*therm*elec*] should be cleaned up
Hello all, my name is Parthi. I'm new to editing wiki, so I'm not familiar with the procedures or terminology. I am, however, a member of the thermoelectric research community (3rd-year graduate student in Electrical Engineering under Prof. Rajeev Ram).

It seems to me that a bunch of pages (i.e. "thermoelectricity" and "thermogenerator") should be replaced by disambiguation pages. For example, in the case of the "thermoelectricity" page, the "see also" list seems like decent place to start, although there are several items on that list that plainly don't belong. In the case of the "thermoelectric effect" page, things seem to be in better shape. Nevertheless, the scope of the page should probably be defined with thought toward the set of all pages people might click on to learn about the phenomena of thermoelectricity and related applications.

I'm not sure who the admin for each of these pages is, but it seems like a worthy cause to link everything in this area together into two logically distinct pages:

[page #1] "Thermoelectric Effect":
A page describing generally the science of thermoelectricity. It should begin with the three traditional thermoelectric effects (Seebeck, Peltier, and Thomson). There should also be a brief mention of the figure-of-merit with links to the literature, since considerations of this quantity have an important influence on the community of scientists focusing on developing the new generation of thermoelectric materials.

I also believe a brief mention of other solid-state thermally-driven voltage-generating schemes belongs here, despite the fact that the research community refers to phenomena such as solid-state thermionics and nernst-effect devices distinctly from thermoelectricity. I believe this because the word thermoelectricity is often colloquially used as a catch-all term for solid-state thermal-to-electrical devices.

Finally, there should be a discussion of the thermodynamic properties of both generators and refridgerators based on these devices. Questions of reversibility should be addressed here. This section should also contain links to the generator and cooler pages.

The existing page satisfies most of these concerns and seems to have a legitimate scientific dialogue ongoing.

[page #2] "Thermoelectric generator":
A page describing the development of high-power, efficient generators based on the effects described above. There is a body of information which I cannot find anywhere on wikipedia regarding such topics as the role of heat exchangers and segmentation/cascading in real generators.

This page should contain links to specific applications, such as RTGs (wiki:"Radioisotope thermoelectric generator"), waste-heat-recovery schemes in cars (wiki:"Automotive Thermoelectric Generators"), and more generally energy harvesting (wiki:"Energy harvesting"). There should also be a link to the cooler-device page (wiki:"Thermoelectric cooling") here.

I believe a new page should be created for this purpose, as no existing page seems to address this concern or contain nearly sufficient content to that end.
 * Seems to have been done. - Rod57 (talk) 02:30, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Upshot:
I would like to communicate with the admins of these pages to address these concerns. I would also like to take over the admin of any pages in this area that people are willing to part with. Does anyone know how this can be accomplished?

There are also a number of people more qualified than myself for this task (obviously, since I'm a graduate student), so if this is the case with the current admin, please let me know. I do not have much experience with wikipedia's admin/editing procedures, so I hope I'm not offending anyone.

Parthi.santhanam (talk) 21:06, 27 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia pages don't have specific admins so you or anyone can make the changes they wish - possibly after discussion on this talk page. - Rod57 (talk) 02:34, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

PbTe/TAGS
MMRTG says it uses PbTe/TAGS thermocouple but this article doesn't seem to mention TAGS - What is TAGS ? Seems to be (Ag--Ge--Sb--Te). - Rod57 (talk) 13:53, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Power generation - overly optimistic
The section Power generation is rather optimistic with the possible use. This might be due to some scinetific articles also promissing to much, more like an eye catcher or to get funding. Most literature sources about TE materials naturally have an optimistic POV. This is one reason we have to be careful with primary sources, especially with introductory comments on possible applications. The use of waste heat is such an example: the TE generator also does need a temperature difference. So the waste heat from conventional power plants is usually not useful for thermoelectric generation as the heat is at low temperatures, as low as the heat sink allows for. Transportation may be an exeaption here, as combustion engines produce waste heat at higher temperature, but the use is still limited.--Ulrich67 (talk) 18:23, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Assessment comment from Jan 2008
Substituted at 18:09, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Figure on SnSe
The Figure on SnSe appears to be the same as a figure in Nature volume 508, pages 373–377 (17 April 2014). That seems to be subject to copyright. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.130.253.49 (talk) 19:06, 16 September 2018 (UTC)

Research on doped magnesium-Sb
Copper-doped Mg-Sb has a good ratio - Rod57 (talk) 20:24, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Amorphous Materials section not neutral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_materials#Amorphous_materials

This section is not particularly well-written, and definitely is not neutrally worded (e.g. "A bright future is expected for these materials") Rkurchin (talk) 20:01, 16 January 2024 (UTC)