Exploiting chemical bonding principles to design high-performance thermoelectric materials

Powell, A. V., Vaqueiro, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7545-6262, Tippireddy, S. and Prado-Gonjal, J. (2025) Exploiting chemical bonding principles to design high-performance thermoelectric materials. Nature Reviews Chemistry. ISSN 2397-3358 doi: 10.1038/s41570-025-00695-6

Abstract/Summary

Thermoelectric materials offer unique opportunities to convert otherwise wasted thermal energy into useful electrical energy. Many of the traditional thermoelectric materials, such as bismuth telluride and lead telluride contain scarce and toxic elements. This has motivated the search for new high-performance materials containing readily-available and environmentally-less-damaging elements. Numerous advances in the development of high-performance thermoelectric materials exploit fundamental chemical-bonding principles. Much of the thermoelectric literature lies at the interface of chemistry, physics, and materials science. In this Review, progress in the design of high-performance materials is discussed in terms of ideas that are familiar in chemistry. This includes the influence of concepts such as bonding heterogeneity, covalency, polarizability, lone pairs, and different bonding models, including multi-center, metallic, and iono-covalent archetypes. In this way, we seek to present aspects of this diverse field of research in terms that are accessible to the chemistry community.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/120615
Identification Number/DOI	10.1038/s41570-025-00695-6
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Nanoscience and Materials Life Sciences > School of Chemistry, Food and Pharmacy > Department of Chemistry Interdisciplinary centres and themes > Energy Research
Uncontrolled Keywords	thermoelectric materials; chemical bonding
Publisher	Nature
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