Fabricating and Testing of a Thermoelectric Generator Based on Silicon Nanowires

As the world is going through an evolutionary development in most of the science fields, there is an essential and exceptional demand for higher efficiency power generators to recover the thermal losses. Recently thermoelectric materials have attracted extensive attention for this purpose. The recent advancement in nanotechnology has a remarkable impact on thermoelectric materials development. This resulted in nano structured materials whose thermoelectric properties exhibit a great challenge to its bulk form, such as Silicon nanowires (SiNWs). Silicon nanowires are promising thermoelectric materials as they offer large reductions in thermal conductivity over bulk Si without significant decrease in the electrical conductivity.

In the present work silicon nanowires have been implemented in fabricating a thermoelectric device which can be employed in different applications, such as engines, to recover part of the energy lost in these applications. Out of the many methods proposed to produce nanowires, the most recent one which is the wet chemical etching method has been adopted in the present work.