NSF TTP-T: Transforming Energy Harvesting and Cooling: Breaking Performance and Cost Barriers of Thermoelectric Technology via High-Throughput Printing

This project is funded through the NSF Translation to Practice (TTP) program, which supports efforts to translate research discoveries into practical tools that benefit communities, industry, and society. For the TTP program, teams advance research results toward real-world deployment and adoption. This research team creates high-performance and low-cost thermoelectric devices that can both cool things and turn heat into electricity, using a low-cost printing process. These devices are used in cooling and refrigeration for electronics, data centers, automobiles and buildings without the need for harmful refrigerants. The devices also capture wasted heat and turn it into useful electricity to improve energy efficiency and power sensors and smart devices. An innovative and scalable ink-based printing method makes these devices much cheaper and easier to produce. The team turns recent research breakthroughs into real products, by making devices that are up to ten times higher in performance and ten times less expensive than current technologies, bringing significant economic and societal impacts. This work enables sustainable energy harvesting and cooling technologies to become accessible to broad communities, thus improving resilience and quality of life. Key technical challenges in designing, printing and integrating thermoelectric materials and metal electrodes into high-performance and low-cost devices are addressed in this project. A multi-physics design and modeling framework help to realize printed devices with fully optimized composition and property distributions, dimensions and form factors. A high-throughput printing and sintering process is utilized for large-scale device manufacturing, and the metal contact processing is established to achieve both low contact resistances and high bonding strength between the metal electrodes and thermoelectric materials. Both the cooling and power generation performances of the printed devices are validated by testing the power density, efficiency, cooling temperature, and thermal and mechanical stability under various operational conditions. In addition, this project generates new knowledge on the design, printing and integration of semiconducting and metallic inks and their interface properties, which is widely applicable to the printing of a broad range of electronics, optoelectronics, and devices for energy conversion/storage. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.