As early as 1978 Bhandari and Rowe [Bhandari, 1978] suggested improving thermoelectrics by reducing the grain size.  Back then 'fine grain' meant maybe micron sized or slightly smaller.  But today people are learning to make nano-scale grain structures. 

Google is an amazing resource.  But if you simply type "thermoelectric" into a Google search you'll find more pages related to power plants (i.e. generating electricity from heat by burning coal, natural gas, etc.) than related to the solid-state energy conversion technology.  Sorting out one meaning from the other is called "disambiguation" on Wikipedia.com.

We've tried to create a Google News search which returns pages:

• related to thermoelectric energy conversion
• appeared (or update) recently on the web

Here is a link to our customized Google-assisted TE News search:

http://www.zts.com/googlefeed

Bookmark that page and you'll always be up to date.

"MSU is at the cutting edge of the potential of thermoelectricity" says US Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan while visiting the  MSU Energy and Automotive Research Laboratories in East Lansing, Michigan USA. The State News story on Levin's visit to MSU includes an aerogel demonstation by Jeff Sakamoto.  The full quote from Levin:

Recent Google searches on thermoelectrics turned up (in no particular order):

The Voyager 2 spacecraft passed through the heliosheath boundary, also called the solar wind termination shock, on August 30, 2007.  A classic example of overdesign, the Plasma Science instrument, radio and power supply (a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator using silicon-germanium thermocouples) are among the systems on Voyager 2 still working 30 years after lauch.

This week in Google

Google.com is amazing.  I have a "Google Alert" set to email me when new webpages come appear which mention thermoelectrics.  Many of these hits concern "thermoelectric power plants", which includes anything that produces electricity by burning something (as opposed to hydroelectric, solar or nuclear, for example).

But here are some recent hits related to thermoelectric energy conversion:

Prof. Tritt of Clemson University is well known in the thermoelectric community.   Whether by design or chance, his recent comments at the NanoTX ’07 conference (Oct. 2-4, 2007) in Dallas, Texas USA caught the attention of some of the energy websites:

This is actually a couple years old, but I stumbled across it today.

A team at Rensselaer and the Washington University of Medicine in St. Louis are developing a small, implantable  thermoelectric device and heat pipe to cool specific portions of the brain and help inhibit epileptic seizures.  The full story,

    http://news.rpi.edu/campusnews/update.do

indicates in 2005 they were moving toward testing in primates.

A journal review article on the subject is available:

Academician, Professor L. Anatychuk from Ukraine, scientist, engineer, the author of books and scientific works, editor of “Journal of  Thermoelectricity”, organizer and President of the International Thermoelectric Academy is well known to thermoelectric community.

On July 15 Dr. Anatychuk celebrates his 70-th jubilee and 50-th anniversary of scientific and pedagogical activity in the field of  thermoelectricity.