Executive Summary : | The majority of energy demand in India and the world is currently met by fossil fuels, which are replenishing rapidly. There is a pressing need for alternative energy resources, which can be partially fulfilled by thermoelectric technology. Traditional thermoelectric materials like PbTe, SnTe, and Bi2Te3 are toxic or expensive, and their fabrication, manufacturing engineering, and nano-structuring have proven costly and challenging. This has led to a trend towards developing cheap, scalable thermoelectric technology, with a potential candidate being quantum dot (QD) based thermoelectrics. The project aims to synthesize a system of arrays of QDs using various chemical/physical routes and study their thermoelectric properties. The aim is to achieve maximum zT while reducing fabrication costs. However, the system of QD arrays has disorder effects due to random arrangement, size distribution, alignment, non-uniform doping, defects, trap states, and surface states. To address these issues, the project will synthesize the system of QD arrays using various physical and chemical methods and consolidate them into pellets using hot press or spark plasma sintering techniques. The synthesized samples will be characterized for thermoelectric properties, and theoretical fitting will be done. A theoretical model for disorder effects on thermoelectric properties will be provided, and the optimized size and doping concentration of an array of QDs will be optimized for maximum efficiency. The ultimate goal is to achieve maximum thermoelectric efficiency at the lowest fabrication cost, producing a low-cost, scalable QD-based thermoelectric material that can be mass produced for practical applications. This idea will be implemented on nontoxic, economical earth-abundant SnSe material. |