A Review on Organic Polymer-Based Thermoelectric Materials

Converting heat energy directly into useable electricity by harvesting low-cost energy resources, such as solar energy and the waste heat, has attracted great interest recent years. Thermoelectricity offers a promising technology to convert heat from solar energy and to recover waste heat from industrial sectors and automobile exhausts. Classically, a number of inorganic compounds have been considered as the best thermoelectric materials. Organic materials in particular intrinsically conducting polymers had been considered as competitors of classical thermoelectric since their figure of merit has been improved several orders of magnitude in last year. In addition, the applications of thermoelectric polymers at low temperatures have shown various advantages such as easy and low cost of fabrication, light weight, and flexibility. Therefore, organic thermoelectric materials will be the best candidates to compete with inorganic materials in the future. In this review, we focused on exploring different types of organic thermoelectric materials and the factors affecting their thermoelectric properties, and discussed various strategies to improve the performance of thermoelectric materials. In addition, a review on theoretical studies of thermoelectric transport in polymers is also given.

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