Engineering Commons^™

Organic materials have attracted recent interest as thermoelectric (TE) converters due to their low cost and ease of fabrication. We examine the effects of disorder on the TE properties of semiconducting polymers based on the Gaussian disorder model (GDM) for site energies while employing Pauli’s master equation approach to model hopping between localized sites. Our model is in good agreement with experimental results and a useful tool to study hopping transport. We show that stronger overlap between sites can improve the electrical conductivity without adversely affecting the Seebeck coefficient. We find that positional disorder aids the formation of new conduction …