Improved thermoelectric power efficiency trade-off via anti-reflection enabled resonant tunneling molecular wire

Abstract

In this work, an improved thermoelectric (TE) generator is designed by embedding a single-mode resonant tunnelling nanowire within an electronic anti-reflecting cavity (ARC) to utilise the band-pass nature of transmission. It is theoretically demonstrated using the Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function (NEGF) formalism that this device can significantly enhance the generated output power from waste heat at a high conversion efficiency and can notably overcome the major drawbacks of a typical 1D resonant tunneling diode (RTD) thermoelectric. A detailed comparative analysis with RTD-TE is also presented in terms of power efficiency trade-off to reveal the superiority of this device.

Keywords:

• Thermoelectric
• anti reflection
• NEGF
• power
• efficiency
• RTD