All-Printed, Flexible Organic Thermoelectric Generators
- khashayar Ghaffarzadeh
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Loup Chopplet[1], Jiang Jing[1], Nicolas Battaglini[1], Vincent Noël[1], Benoît Piro[1], Giorgio Mattana[1],* [1] Université Paris Cité, ITODYS, CNRS, UMR 7086, 15 rue J.-A. de Baïf, F-75013 Paris, France
The current climate emergency and the perspective of fossil fuel depletion are pushing researchers towards the quest for efficient and environmentally friendly energy sources or conversion technologies. Within this context, thermoelectric materials, i.e. materials capable of recycling waste heat through its partial conversion to electrical power, have attracted considerable attention in the last twenty years[1]. Organic semiconductors (OSCs), such as conjugated polymers and small molecules, have recently become a blooming field of research in the continuous search for potential candidates for the fabrication of thermoelectric systems. Indeed, OSCs possess some important advantages compared to their inorganic counterparts, in particular their processability at room temperature in liquid phase using printing fabrication techniques and their excellent mechanical robustness and flexibility [2][3].
At the PRINT’UP institute, we developed a fabrication and characterisation protocol for all-printed organic thermoelectric generators, fabricated on flexible polyimide substrates. Each generator is composed of two semiconducting legs, one p-type doped and the other n-type doped, electrically connected in series. All electrical connections are realised using inkjet-printed silver contacts while the p-type leg is made using inkjet-printed poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS). The n-type semiconducting leg is made of a polymer recently described in the literature[4], namely the poly(3,7-dihydrobenzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']difuran-2,6-dione) (PBDF), that we deposited by ink-dispensing (see Figure 1a for an optical image of the final device, the total active area of the generator is ~ 6 sq.cm).
Our devices were fully characterised to evaluate their thermoelectric performances. As for the electric conductivity, the inkjet-printed p-leg exhibited a value of (400 ± 10) S.cm-1, while the n-type OSC showed a mean value of (260 ± 70) S.cm-1. It is important to notice that these values remained stable for devices stored in ambient conditions over several weeks.
In terms of Seebeck coefficient, the mean value of the overall device was (23 ± 5) µV.K-1 (stable in ambient conditions for more than 75 days). Our devices generated an output power of (5 ± 2) nW for a temperature difference of ΔT = 60 K for a single thermocouple; the best performing device was able to generate (at the same temperature difference) an output power of 8.8 nW (see Figure 1b). These results are comparable to the performances already reported in the literature for similar devices but it should be emphasised that, contrary to the large majority of generators reported so far, our thermoelectric devices were completely fabricated and characterised in ambient conditions.
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[1] D. Beretta et al., Mater. Sci. Eng., 2019, 138, 100501. [2] I. H. Eryilmaz et al., Chem. Commun., 2023, 59, 3160.
[3] J. Jing et al., J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, 12, 6185.
[4] Z. Ke et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2023, 145, 6, 3706.
[5] N. J. Pataki et al., Adv. Funct. Mater., 2024, 34, 2400982.
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