Issue 16, 2017

High-performance thermoelectricity in edge-over-edge zinc-porphyrin molecular wires

Abstract

If high efficiency organic thermoelectric materials could be identified, then these would open the way to a range of energy harvesting technologies and Peltier coolers using flexible and transparent thin-film materials. We have compared the thermoelectric properties of three zinc porphyrin (ZnP) dimers and a ZnP monomer and found that the “edge-over-edge” dimer formed from stacked ZnP rings possesses a high electrical conductance, negligible phonon thermal conductance and a high Seebeck coefficient of the order of 300 μV K−1. These combine to yield a predicted room-temperature figure of merit of ZT ≈ 4, which is the highest room-temperature ZT ever reported for a single organic molecule. This high value of ZT is a consequence of the low phonon thermal conductance arising from the stacked nature of the porphyrin rings, which hinders phonon transport through the edge-over-edge molecule and enhances the Seebeck coefficient.

Graphical abstract: High-performance thermoelectricity in edge-over-edge zinc-porphyrin molecular wires

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
12 Dec 2016
Accepted
23 Mar 2017
First published
31 Mar 2017
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale, 2017,9, 5299-5304

High-performance thermoelectricity in edge-over-edge zinc-porphyrin molecular wires

M. Noori, H. Sadeghi and C. J. Lambert, Nanoscale, 2017, 9, 5299 DOI: 10.1039/C6NR09598D

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