Date of Award

January 2014

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Chemical Engineering

First Advisor

Yue Wu

Second Advisor

John Morgan

Committee Member 1

James Caruthers

Committee Member 2

You-Yeon Won

Committee Member 3

Xiulin Ruan

Abstract

In 2012, more than 58% of the energy produced in the US was rejected in the form of heat. The rapid development of thermoelectric materials in the past decade has raised new hopes for the possibility of directly converting some of this waste thermal energy back to electricity. However, the large scale deployment of thermoelectric devices is still limited by the mediocre conversion efficiency. Nanostructured materials have been proved to be able to significantly improve conversion efficiency. My research is devoted to developing efficient solution phase reactions to synthesize nanostructured thermoelectric materials in an economical and scalable way. We also aim at exploring the unique applications of solution synthesized nanostructured materials, e.g. developing nanocrystal ink to coat on flexible substrates for applications in wearable thermoelectric devices.

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