Fabrication and Evaluation of a Thermoelectric Micro-Generator

Abstract

In this paper, we fabricated a Bi₂Te₃ thermoelectric micro-generator, and evaluated those performances. Bi₂Te₃ is one of popular thermoelectric materials with the highest thermoelectric properties at room temperature. The patterned thin film of Bi₂Te₃ was deposited on a free-standing Si₃N₄ thin film by using a flash evaporation method through shadow masks which were made by standard micro-fabrication processes. In the design of the micro-generators, we got the output voltages of the micro-generators by numerically calculating the temperature distribution of the freestanding thin film using ANSYS CFX. The calculated output voltages agreed well with experimental results. The output voltages of the fabricated micro-generators were measured while simply heating the bottom of the micro-device, and the maximum output voltage was 48 mV at a 13 K temperature difference.