Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : October 22, 2016 - October 23, 2016
In this study, we fabricated an in-plane thermoelectric micro-generator using free-standing film prepared by standard micro-fabrication processes. We fabricated a SiNx free-standing film substrate about 5 μm thick on Si wafer, and both p and n type of bismuth telluride thermoelectric thin films by using a coaxial type vacuum arc evaporation method. The thermoelectric films were annealed for one hour at 573 K to improve the film properties. A shadow mask was used for the patterning of the generator. Temperature difference of 22.3 K was measured in the generator due to its high thermal resistance at 373 K heating. The exergy of the thermoelectric device is up to 7 %. Therefore, the generator converted about 0.4 % of thermal energy into electric energy, even though the material performance is low with ZT = 0.28. The conversion efficiency is much higher than that of the conventional Π type thermoelectric module. It was possible to get higher performance by the thermal design, which is a more simple way than an improvement of ZT.
