Recent progress of organic and hybrid thermoelectric materials

Organic and hybrid thermoelectric materials have been very rapidly developed in the past decade, because the requirement for new energy and energy savings has increased due to the rapid economic development of developing countries and environmental crisis resulting in global warming. Thermoelectric technology has been considered to create electricity from a temperature difference, and be effective for energy harvesting. Organic and hybrid thermoelectric materials cannot be used at high temperature. In the practical world, most of the waste heat energy comes from temperatures below 150 degrees C. Thus, organic materials could be applied to recover electricity from waste heat energy below 150 degrees C. In this review, after an introduction of the advantages of organic and hybrid thermoelectric materials, their brief history over two decades and the recent progress to improve the thermoelectric performance will be described by focusing on the researches of the author's group. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.