Every time you charge a phone or run a laptop, heat builds up inside the tiny electronic components and slows the device down. This project aims to stop that heat from being a problem by using quantum tricks at the scale of single atoms. The core problem is that today’s materials cannot efficiently convert heat into electricity or use electricity to pump heat away—a process called Peltier cooling. Current thermoelectric materials are too inefficient to make silent, solid-state cooling or waste-heat harvesting practical for consumer electronics or server farms. The researcher proposes an entirely new approach: building ultra-thin films from atomically precise nanoclusters, then exploiting quantum interference in how electrons and phonons move through them. By engineering these nanoscale structures, she aims to achieve a thermoelectric figure of merit above 3 at room temperature—a threshold that would make Peltier cooling and waste-heat conversion commercially viable. If successful, this fundamental science could lead to flexible, wearable devices that turn body heat into battery power, and to silent cooling systems for smartphones and laptops with no moving parts. It would also strengthen UK competitiveness in thermoelectric energy conversion, a field where the UK currently lacks capability.
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The performance of consumer electronic devices is largely constrained by the heat generated in electronic components. Efficient cooling of these components would lead to faster devices with lower energy consumption. This can be achieved using Peltier cooling provided materials with a high thermoelectric efficiency can be identified. Peltier cooling is silent, environmentally friendly and requires no moving parts. Conversely, an efficient conversion of waste heat through the Seebeck effect using such materials would have applications in IT infrastructure and server farms. That is why there is a world-wide race to develop new thermoelectric materials for cooling low-power devices and converting waste heat into electricity. However, current thermoelectric materials are not sufficient to create a viable technology platform for cooling and energy harvesting. Phase-coherent quantum transport has been demonstrated recently in subnanometre structures at room temperature. This creates possibility of utilising quantum phenomena to engineer properties of single atomically precise nanocluster (ANCs) to form ultra-thin film materials with unprecedented thermoelectric cooling performance. My aim in this proposal is to exploit phase-coherent quantum, spin and phonon transport in novel ANC-based nanodevices to design radically-new high efficiency thermoelectric materials. The efficiency of a thermoelectric material to act as refrigerator via the Peltier effect or to convert waste heat to electricity via the Seebeck effect is characterised by the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT. A target value of ZT>3 at room temperature would lead to disruptive new cooling and energy harvesting technologies based on thermoelectricity. For this, materials with high electrical conductance, high Peltier coefficient and low thermal conductance are needed. The radically-new hybrid nanostructured materials proposed in this proposal will be formed from ANCs and then up-scaled to parallel arrays of ANCs between 2D-materials as electrodes. Employing quantum phenomena such as quantum spin effects and quantum and phonon interference in ANCs to yield a new generation of high-performance thermoelectric materials is an entirely new approach. This proposal will elucidate design strategies for the development of new thermoelectric cooling devices and consequently will change the community view on routes to engineer and realize highly efficient novel thermoelectric materials for cooling of consumer electronic devices. NanoCool will fill a UK capability gap and have a strong influence on UK competitiveness in the field of thermoelectric energy conversion. It could lead to a new generation of flexible and wearable electronic devices for converting waste heat into electricity, with impact on consumer electronics and ICT.
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