Prof. Michael Chabinyc from UC-Santa Barbara will present a seminar entitled, “Conjugated Materials for Thermoelectrics.”

Abstract:  Organic semiconductors provide the opportunity for low-cost fabrication of novel flexible thin film electronics. There has been significant progress in organic light emitting diodes (commercial products), solar cells (efficiencies of 10%), and thin film transistors (carrier mobilities > 1 cm²/Vs). A new application for organic semiconducting materials is thermoelectric energy conversion. Thermoelectric devices convert thermal gradients to electrical potentials and by reciprocity the converse. We will describe recent work studying the relationship of the thermopower and electrical conductivity in both p- and n- type organic semiconductors. We find a striking correlation between thermopower and electrical conductivity across materials. This relationship can be tuned by processing conditions leading to improvements in performance. New methods to dope n-type materials in the solid state will be presented. An outlook for the prospects of organic thermoelectrics will be given along with identification of current challenges.

Host: Greg Szulczewski