Boosting thermoelectric efficiency using time-dependent control

Abstract

Thermoelectric efficiency is defined as the ratio of power delivered to the load of a device to the rate of heat flow from the source. Till date, it has been studied in presence of thermodynamic constraints set by the Onsager reciprocal relation and the second law of thermodynamics that severely bottleneck the thermoelectric efficiency. In this study, we propose a pathway to bypass these constraints using a time-dependent control and present a theoretical framework to study dynamic thermoelectric transport in the far from equilibrium regime. The presence of a control yields the sought after substantial efficiency enhancement and importantly a significant amount of power supplied by the control is utilised to convert the wasted-heat energy into useful-electric energy. Our findings are robust against nonlinear interactions and suggest that external time-dependent forcing, which can be incorporated with existing devices, provides a beneficial scheme to boost thermoelectric efficiency.

8 pages + 3 figures (Accepted in Scientific Reports)

References in corpus (14)

• Driven quantum transport on the nanoscale
• Cooling a nanomechanical resonator with quantum back-action
• An On-Demand Coherent Single Electron Source
• Strong coupling between single-electron tunneling and nano-mechanical motion
• A time-dependent approach to electron pumping in open quantum systems
• Cooling carbon nanotubes to the phononic ground state with constant electron current
• Vibrational effects in laser driven molecular wires
• Rectification of laser-induced electronic transport through molecules
• Nonadiabatic Electron Pumping: Maximal Current with Minimal Noise
• Nonadiabatic electron heat pump
• Charge transport through a molecule driven by a high-frequency field
• Improved Dyson series expansion for steady-state quantum transport beyond the weak coupling limit - divergences and resolution
• Cooling of nanomechanical resonator by thermally activated single-electron transport
• Thermoelectric transport through a quantum nanoelectromechanical system and its backaction

Cited by in corpus (29)

• Fundamental aspects of steady-state conversion of heat to work at the nanoscale
• Quantum thermodynamic devices: from theoretical proposals to experimental reality
• Universal Coherence-Induced Power Losses of Quantum Heat Engines in Linear Response
• Effective Floquet-Gibbs states for dissipative quantum systems
• Periodic energy transport and entropy production in quantum electronics
• Fermion-parity duality and energy relaxation in interacting open systems
• Time-dependent thermoelectric transport for nanoscale thermal machines
• Kinetics and thermodynamics of a driven open quantum system
• A Landau-Zener Lindblad equation and work extraction from coherences
• Duality for open fermion systems: energy-dependent weak coupling and quantum master equations
• Thermoelectrics of Interacting Nanosystems -- Exploiting Superselection instead of Time-Reversal Symmetry
• Cooperation and Competition in Synchronous Open Quantum Systems
• Quantum coherent control of nonlinear thermoelectric transport in a triple-dot Aharonov-Bohm heat engine
• Enhanced performance of a quantum-dot-based nanomotor due to Coulomb interactions
• Closed-loop approach to thermodynamics
• Spin-dependent heat signatures of single-molecule spin dynamics
• Mixed electrical-heat noise spectrum in a quantum dot
• Simulating time-dependent thermoelectric transport in quantum systems
• Thermodynamics of energy, charge and spin currents in thermoelectric quantum-dot spin valve
• Charge Transport and Entropy Production Rate in Magnetically Active Molecular Dimer
• Coherent control of thermoelectric currents and noise in quantum thermocouples
• Charge and heat transport of soft nanosystems in the presence of time-dependent perturbations
• Dynamical exchange and phase induced switching of a localized molecular spin
• Readout of quantum screening effects using a time-dependent probe
• Dissipative features of the driven spin-fermion system
• Quantum transport phenomena induced by time-dependent fields
• Thermoelectric study of the time-dependent Resonant Level Model
• Thermoelectric performance of nano junctions subjected to microwave driven spin-orbit coupling
• Instantaneous Emission Rate of Electron Transport through a quantum point contact