Journal of Computational Electronics 11, 67-77 (2012)

SCIE

Thermoelectric performance of disordered and nanostructured graphene ribbons using Green

Fulvio Mazzamuto, Jérôme Saint-Martin, Viet Hung Nguyen, Christophe Chassat and Philippe Dollfus

The thermoelectric properties of defected graphene,nanoribbons (GNRs) and multi-junction (MJ) GNRs,coupling periodic armchair sections of different width are,analyzed by means of Green’s function techniques to simulate,electron and phonon transport. Among the different,strategies likely to enhance the thermoelectric performance,,the effects of edge disorder and random vacancies are shown,to be small since they lead to the concomitant degradation,of the phonon thermal conductance and of the electronic,conductance, which finally reduces the thermoelectric factor,ZT. However, the periodic distribution of vacancies and the,structuring of GNRs in MJ-GNRs both lead to the enhancement,of the figure of merit ZT. In the latter case, in addition,to the strong reduction of the phonon thermal conductance,,an effect of resonant tunneling of electrons allows retaining,high electronic conductance and enhancing significantly the,thermopower. Finally, by introducing a periodic distribution,of vacancies in the MJ-GNR, the maximum value ZT = 0.4,is reached at room temperature