An Analytic Study of the Wiedemann-Franz Law and the Thermoelectric Figure of Merit

Authors

Aakash Yadav
PC Deshmukh
Ken Roberts
NM Jisrawi
Sree Ram Valluri, University of Western OntarioFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-9-2019

First Page

1

Last Page

17

URL with Digital Object Identifier

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1904.03183

Abstract

Advances in optimizing thermoelectric material efficiency have seen a parallel activity in theoretical and computational advances. In the current work, it is shown that the calculation of exact Fermi-Dirac integrals enables the generalization of the Wiedemann-Franz law (WF) to optimize the dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit ZT. This is done by optimizing the Seebeck coefficient, the electrical conductivity and the thermal conductivity. In the calculation of the thermal conductivity, both electronic and phononic contributions are included. The solutions provide insight into the relevant parameter space including the physical significance of complex solutions and their dependence on the scattering parameter r and the reduced chemical potential.

Notes

This article was posted to arXiv.org [cond-mat.mes-hall] and is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03183

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.