High-throughput screening of room temperature active Peltier cooling materials in Heusler compounds

Active Peltier cooling enables Peltier heat transfer in addition to the traditional Fourier thermal conductance, which is useful in some special applications, such as the microthermostats. From the material wise, however, the study on the active Peltier cooling materials is rare. We carried out a high-throughput workflow to screen out 5 room-temperature active Peltier cooling materials, GaSbLi2, HgPbCa2, SnTiRu2, GeYbLi2, and GeTiFe2, from 2958 Heusler materials. All the five materials are semimetals or very narrow band gap systems with high electrical conductivity. Some of these materials have relatively large Seebeck coefficients due to the band asymmetry. Their effective thermal conductivity kappa(eff)s, which are the summation of active Peltier thermal conductivity and passive thermal conductivity, are all greater than Cu at the room temperature and Delta T = 1 K. The present work gives a possible way to search active cooling Peltier materials for the applications of precise temperature control.

Automated summary

This study used a high-throughput workflow to screen out five room-temperature active Peltier cooling materials from 2958 Heusler materials. These materials have high electrical conductivity and large Seebeck coefficients, with effective thermal conductivity greater than copper at room temperature and ΔT = 1 K.