The Electronic and Thermoelectric Properties of Si1-xVxAlloys from First Principles

The last decade has seen a renewed interest in thermoelectric (TE) materials. The stimulus to the interest in this class of materials is the recent progress in improving the efficiency of energy conversion by a variety of techniques. The direct conversion of heat energy to electricity using TE is a very appealing option, especially as currently there is a lot of heat energy wasted during the consumption of energy resources (Bell, 2008; Zhang & Zhao, 2015). Although, TEs offer many advantages like lack of dependence on heat source, lack of maintenance, etc. the major drawback of the low efficiency for energy conversion has kept this technology on hold. A quantity ZT called figure of merit, measures the efficiency of conversion for TE materials and is given by the equation