The effect of aluminum nanoparticle on the seebeck coefficient of biomedical thermoelectric devices

Abstract

The Seebeck coefficient is a parameter to measure the efficiency of materials in generating thermoelectric voltage from certain temperature gradient. In this work, the effect of aluminum nano particle on the Seebeck coefficient for silicon based thermoelectric power generator is investigated. Thermoelectric devices which consist of arrays of doped phosphorus and boron channels have been fabricated on silicon wafers via standard CMOS fabrication processes. Aluminum nano particles were then integrated into the doped n-channel, before the fabrication step is completed with the metalization process. Temperature gradients across the two device terminals were created by resistive heating and the output voltages were measured. The results show that there is a substantial improvement in the calculated Seebeck coefficient where the device which been incorporated with 40 nm aluminum nano particles yields the average value of 3390 μV/K to that of control device which yields 784 μV/K. Furthermore, the output voltage is measured to be in the range of 40 mV for the temperature gradient of 12 K, making it to be very viable and attractive for biomedical applications.