Optimizing Thermoelectric Power Factor by Means of a Potential Barrier

TL;DR

This paper analyzes and optimizes potential barriers for thermoelectric energy filtering, demonstrating that specific barrier configurations can significantly enhance the thermoelectric power factor through combined semiclassical and quantum mechanical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a combined simulation approach to optimize potential barriers, revealing conditions for maximizing thermoelectric power factor improvements.

Findings

Approx. 40% improvement in power factor with optimized barriers.

Smooth barriers outperform sharp barriers for energy filtering.

Optimal conditions include large Fermi level offset and barrier width.

Abstract

Large efforts in improving thermoelectric energy conversion are devoted to energy filtering by nanometer size potential barriers. In this work we perform an analysis and optimization of such barriers for improved energy filtering. We merge semiclassical with quantum mechanical simulations to capture tunneling and reflections due to the barrier, and analyze the influence of the width W, the height Vb, and the shape of the barrier, and the position of the Fermi level (EF) above the band edge, {\eta}F. We show that for an optimized design, approx. 40 per cent improvement in the thermoelectric power factor can be achieved if the following conditions are met: {\eta}F is large; the different of Vb from EF is somewhat higher but comparable to kBT; and W is large enough to suppress tunneling. Finally, we show that a smooth energy barrier is beneficial compared to a sharp (square) barrier for increasing the thermoelectric power factor.