Multi-Principal-Element Approach to High-Performance Thermoelectric Materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews how entropy engineering, especially through multi-principal-element alloys, can enhance thermoelectric materials by exploiting composition and microstructure effects, offering a promising new paradigm.

Contribution

It highlights the role of multi-principal-element alloys in advancing thermoelectric performance and synthesizes experimental and theoretical insights across various material systems.

Findings

Entropy engineering improves thermoelectric efficiency.

Multi-principal-element alloys enable high-performance thermoelectrics.

Various material systems show promising results with entropy-based design.

Abstract

High-entropy alloys are characterized by high configurational entropy. Since the discovery of high-entropy alloys (HEA) in 2004, entropy engineering has provided a promising direction for exploiting composition, lattice disorder, band structure, and microstructure effects to advance thermoelectric performance. This review discusses the impact of entropy on thermoelectric properties and looks back at the role of multi-principal-element alloys, a weaker version of HEA, on the development of compositionally complex thermoelectric alloys in achieving high thermoelectric performance. The experimental and theoretical efforts in a wide range of material systems such as TAGS, LAST, half-Heusler, liquid-like copper chalcogenides, SnTe, and CuInTe2 chalcopyrites provide insights into the entropy engineering approach and also promise an emerging paradigm of high-entropy thermoelectrics.