Research activities on thermoelectrics in China cover a wide spectrum spanning the full development chain, from basic research to industrialization. A number of research centers in China have established expertise in both computational and experimental study of thermoelectric materials and devices. Especially, given the growing investment in China into computational approaches for materials design, such methods for thermoelectric materials are likely to become even more prevalent. Looking beyond traditional options, China’s researchers have also contributed to the discovery of new families of thermoelectric materials. For example, it has been demonstrated that large anharmonicity induced by crystal structures can lead to intrinsically very low lattice thermal conductivity, and thus good thermoelectric performance. The recent discovery of Ag2S-based ductile semiconductors has driven a shift in the potential for flexible thermoelectrics. The continuous development of high-performance thermoelectric materials has enabled the design and fabrication of TE devices for practical applications and the conversion efficiency has been steadily improved up to 15%.

陈立东，中科院上海硅酸盐研究所研究员、高性能陶瓷和超微结构国家重点实验室主任。1981年毕业于湖南大学，1990年4月获日本东北大学工学博士学位。先后在日本RIKEN公司、日本航空宇宙技术研究所、日本东北大学金属材料研究所（助手、副教授）工作。2001年获中科院“百人计划”资助，先后获国家杰出青年基金（2003年）和基金委创新群体科学基金（2009年）资助，2023年当选中国科学院院士。长期从事热电材料的设计合成、热电器件集成与应用技术的研究。在Science、Nature、Nature Materials、Advanced Materials、APL等期刊发表学术论文350余篇，著《Thermoelectric Materials and Devices》（2020, Elsevier）等，获2013年度国家自然科学二等奖等，任《npj Computational Materials》Co-editor-in-chief。