Silicon Nanostructures for Thermoelectric Applications

In this chapter, an overview on silicon nanostructures for thermoelectric applications is presented. After an introduction on the key concepts of thermoelectricity, we show that nanostructuring is one of the most promising solutions for making high efficient thermoelectric devices. In particular, we discuss the use of nanostructured silicon as a good thermoelectric material, due to its abundance, its nontoxicity, and its technological pervasiveness in the society, compared to other materials often proposed in the literature. Furthermore, a top-down process for the reliable fabrication of very complex and large area arrays of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) is shown and discussed. Finally, we show that these networks can be employed for the fabrication of high efficiency thermoelectric generators, and the high reliability and the high tolerance with respect to SiNW width dispersion are demonstrated by means of numerical simulations.