Performance measurement system for thermoelectric nanowire arrays

Miniaturized thermoelectric power generators with low power and high voltage offer attractive solutions to the accelerating trend towards miniaturization of electronic components and "system on a chip" concepts where many functions such as sense, compute, control, communicate and power are located together. Low dimensional thermoelectric materials possess higher ZT value which has been verified theoretically and experimentally in recent year. So, they have been considered to be one of the best choices for the manufacture of micro-thermoelectric power generators. The thickness of nanowire array thermoelectric materials fabricated with a porous alumina film as template are often in the range of ten to several tens of micrometers, and conventional methods cannot be used to measure their thermoelectric performance. A new thermoelectric performance measuring system used for one-dimensional nanowire array thermoelectric films has been developed in our Lab. It is comprised of three parts, including holder, A/D conversion module and PC. The whole measurement and calculation process is conducted in a PC. The results show that the new system can be used successfully for the thermoelectric performance measurements of film-like nanowire arrays. The structural design and performance measurement results of the new system are presented in this paper.