This is my initial commit for the thermoelectrics team.
The aim of this team is to do open, collaborative research under the general umbrella of turning heat into electricity.
I am a materials engineer (metallurgist). I have a strong personal interest in thermoelectrics but have had very little exposure to the field to date. I would like to apply my skills and tools to the exploration of a new space, and hopefully develop new skills, tools, and understanding along the way. This team will act as a public repository of this journey, and I welcome anyone to join me. I will be starting from ~zero, so if you also have no knowledge of this class of materials but want to be involved then feel free to jump in and lets see where we end up.
I see good overlap with other teams here, for example free energy and superconductors.
We will start by exploring questions like:
- What makes the ideal thermoelectric material? Ignoring physical constraints, what is the maximally great thermoelectric in a purely conceptual sense?
- Under the constraints of physical laws, how closely can this ideal be approximated?
- What are the trade-offs inherent to these systems? What are the fundamental couplings that must be balanced or broken?
- How can we model these systems, using data-driven and/or physically-based approaches?
- How can these systems be physically instantiated, scaled and distributed?
- etc
I am currently working on a post on axiomatic design (AD). I will be carrying out an analysis of thermoelectric systems using the AD framework, and developing an LLM based AD tool.