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Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

Thermoelectric Transport In Disordered Organic And Inorganic Semiconductors, Meenakshi Upadhyaya Jul 2021

Thermoelectric Transport In Disordered Organic And Inorganic Semiconductors, Meenakshi Upadhyaya

Doctoral Dissertations

The need for alternative energy sources has led to extensive research on optimizing the conversion efficiency of thermoelectric (TE) materials. TE efficiency is governed by figure-of-merit (ZT) and it has been an enormously challenging task to increase ZT > 1 despite decades of research due to the interdependence of material properties. Most doped inorganic semiconductors have a high electrical conductivity and moderate Seebeck coefficient, but ZT is still limited by their high lattice thermal conductivity. One approach to address this problem is to decrease thermal conductivity by means of alloying and nanostructuring, another is to consider materials with an inherently low …


Electro-Thermal Transport In Two-Dimensional Materials And Their Heterostructures, Arnab K. Majee Jun 2021

Electro-Thermal Transport In Two-Dimensional Materials And Their Heterostructures, Arnab K. Majee

Doctoral Dissertations

”Smaller is better” is the mantra that has driven semiconductor industry for the past 50 years. The on-going quest for faster electronic switching, higher transistor density, and better device performance, has been driven by a self-fulfilling prophecy popularly known as Moore’s law, according to which the number of transistors per unit area of a chip doubles itself approximately every two years. A modern smartphone has about 8 billion transistors, which is as large as current earth’s population. Although each transistor dissipates negligible power, but the collective power dissipation from all the transistors in an electronic gadget and inefficient heat removing …