Oxide Materials for Thermoelectric Conversion.

Thermoelectric technology has emerged as a prominent area of research in the past few decades for harnessing waste heat and improving the efficiency of next-generation renewable energy technologies. There has been rapid progress in the development of high-performance thermoelectric materials, as measured by the dimensionless figure of merit ( =  ·  · ). Several heavy-metal-based thermoelectric materials with commercial-level performance ( = 1) have so far been proposed.