Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Films as Thermoelectric Materials

Abstract

This paper describes the characteristics of single-walled carbon nanotube films as thermoelectric materials. Recently, the thermoelectric properties of carbon nanotubes for energy harvesting have been widely investigated. Since carbon nanotubes can be used to generate a certain amount of thermoelectric power even without any special modification, many reports are more application-oriented than scientific. In addition, due to the complexity of the materials, it is not easy to extract the guiding principles for carbon nanotube-based thermoelectrics, and its research prospects are difficult to understand. In this paper, we first introduce our efforts to elucidate the structure-property relationship in the thermoelectric properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes. Then, focusing on chemical doping, we propose the guiding principle required for its advancement and present our recent studies using this principle.