Study of Seebeck coefficient in organic materials under nonlinear temperature distributions

Abstract

Environmental issues and energy crisis are huge challenges in today’s world. As one of green energy sources, thermoelectric (TE) materials have attracted tremendous attraction for they can convert free heat energy to electricity. In our work, through the master equation (ME) method, we studied the characteristics of charge transport in the organic material under nonlinear temperature distributions. Under each temperature distribution, Seebeck coefficient is analyzed with different factors such as the temperature, the reorganization energy and the energetic disorder strength. Especially, Seebeck coefficient of different temperature distributions showed different performances when the reorganization energy changes. Our studies will be helpful to look further into TE properties of organic materials and improve the application of TE devices.