General approach of the photothermoelectric technique for thermal characterization of solid thermoelectric materials

This work focuses on the photothermoelectric (PTE) technique allowing the thermal characterization of solid-state thermoelectric (TE) materials. Previously, this technique was restricted to TE materials having low electrical conductivities. Here, the PTE technique is extended and generalized to all solid-state TE materials with low or high electrical conductivities. This is achieved by taking into account the Gaussian shape of the thermal excitation source. The formalism of this new methodology is developed and the procedure for extracting thermal parameters is proposed. For illustration, two different TE materials are studied: with relatively high electrical conductivity (Bi2Te2.4Se0.6) and relatively low electrical conductivity (Bi2Ca2Co1.7Ox). The thermal properties of these two materials (thermal diffusivity, effusivity and conductivity) are found and compared to those obtained by the photothermal radiometry which is a well established technique. The good concordance between the results obtained by these two techniques demonstrates the relevance of the generalized PTE technique. One of the main advantages of this technique is its non use of an external sensor.