Agustinus Agung Nugroho Sulistyo Hutomo
Renewable energy is very important because it is a sustainable resource for future energy demand. The heat created by the sun is a suggested sustainable energy resource. Another source is the heat waste from combustion engines, machines, industrial process, etc., which can be converted into electricity using thermoelectric devices. The direct conversion from heat to electricity has made the thermoelectric an environmental friendly process. One of the research focus on thermoelectric is the investigation of the thermoelectric materials to achieve a higher efficiency with a much simple processing for a large scale production. Recently, we have developed a simple method in producing a well-known thermoelectric material Bi2Te3 available for room temperature application. The optimum parameters of compaction method has achieved a comparable result with the commercial Bi2Te3 material. A detailed investigation using our method shows that a lower number of carrier density. In this study that we proposed the use of nano material to make a composite thermoelectric material of Bi2Te3. Several nano material will be investigated to increase the power factor of the composite thermoelectric. The correlation between structure, morphology, mechanical and thermoelectric properties will be analyzed to obtain the working temperature between 300 K and 700 K. This research will also strengthen our research collaboration with the applied physics group at Indonesian Institute of Science in Bandung.