Taking advantage of recent advances in using theoretical calculations to predict the properties of new materials, researchers reported Thursday the discovery of a new class of half-Heusler thermoelectric compounds, including one with a record high figure of merit - a metric used to determine how efficiently a thermoelectric material can convert heat to electricity.
"It maintained the high figure of merit at all temperatures, so it potentially could be important in applications down the road," said physicist Zhifeng Ren, director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH) and corresponding author on a paper reporting the work, published in Nature Communications.
Thermoelectric materials have drawn increasing interest in the research community as a potential source of "clean" power, produced when the material converts heat - often waste heat generated by power plants or other industrial processes - into electricity.
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