High performance thermoelectric materials in a wide range of temperatures are essential to broaden the application
spectrum of thermoelectric devices. This paper presents experiments on the power and efficiency characteristics of lowand
mid-temperature thermoelectric materials. We show that as long as an appreciable temperature difference can be
created over a short thermoelectric leg, good power output can be achieved. For a mid-temperature n-type doped
skutterudite material an efficiency of over 11% at a temperature difference of 600 °C could be achieved. Besides the
improvement of thermoelectric materials, device optimization is a crucial factor for efficient heat-to-electric power
conversion and one of the key challenges is how to create a large temperature across a thermoelectric generator
especially in the case of a dilute incident heat flux. For the solar application of thermoelectrics we investigated the
concept of large thermal heat flux concentration to optimize the operating temperature for highest solar thermoelectric
generator efficiency. A solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency of ~5% could be demonstrated. Solar
thermoelectric generators with a large thermal concentration which minimizes the amount of thermoelectric
nanostrucutured bulk material shows great potential to enable cost-effective electrical power generation from the sun.
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