Abstract:

Solid-state thermoelectric (TE) technology uses electrons and holes as the working fluid for heat pumping and power generation, and has the virtues of no moving parts and high reliability.  Advances in TE materials can lead to high thermal-to-electrical energy conversion efficiency and hence significant energy savings by generating electricity from automotive waste heat.  The first portion of the talk will review the progress and challenges of automotive TE power generation technologies.  I will focus the second part on highlighting some of our recent work on filled skutterudites, a promising class of high efficiency materials for TE power generation; and show how we are able to comprehend carrier and phonon transport and improve their TE performance through experimental effort and first principle-based computational modeling.Our studies have attempted to elucidate the crucial factors in these compounds relating to the nature of dynamic disorder, phonon phase coherence, and electron-phonon interactions.

CV

Jihui Yang is currently the Kyocera Associate Professor at Materials Science and Engineering Department of the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.  Prior to joining the University of Washington in the Fall of 2011, he was a Technical Fellow and Lab Group Manager at GM Research and Development Center, responsible for leading GM’s research on Li-ion battery materials and systems; as well as advanced thermoelectric materials and technology development. 

Jihui is the President of International Thermoelectric Society and Section Editor of the Journal of Electronic Materials.

Jihui received his PhD degree in physics from the University of Michigan in 2000.  He is the recipient of the Kent M. Terwilliger Prize for best doctoral thesis from the University of Michigan Physics Department in 2001, the John M. Campbell Award (outstanding contributions to pure or applied science) from GM R&D Center in 2007, and the US Department of Energy Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) award in 2008.  Jihui was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012.