Manufacturing breakthrough for thermoelectrics

University of Notre Dame researchers have developed a new manufacturing process that allows thermoelectric devices to be produced faster and at lower cost.

The innovative process uses intense pulsed light to sinter thermoelectric material in less than a second, while conventional sintering in thermal ovens can take hours. This method of turning nanoparticle inks into flexible devices was sped up by using machine learning to determine the optimum conditions for the ultrafast but complex sintering process.

According to Notre Dame’s Associate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Yanliang Zhang, flexible thermoelectric devices offer great opportunities for direct conversion of waste heat into electricity as well as solid-state refrigeration. Additionally, they don’t emit greenhouses gases and are durable and quiet, due to their absence of moving parts.

Traditionally, thermoelectric devices have not seen widespread use because there was no method for fast and cost-effective automated manufacturing.  

“The successful integration of photonic flash processing and machine learning can be generalised to highly scalable and low-cost manufacturing of a broad range of energy and electronic materials,” says Zhang.

The research was originally published in Energy and Environmental Science.

Image shows Professor Yanliang Zhang.