1. Fabrication of Nanoscale Multilayered Thin Film-Based Integrated Thermoelectric Devices for Highly-Efficient Thermal-to-Electrical Energy Conversion and Solid-State Cooling in Naval Applications
Zhigang Xiao
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Alabama A&M University, Normal, Alabama, 35762
DON HBCU/MI Program - OAW 2017

2. What the Project is and Why it's Navy-Relevant?
Research Objectives: To develop highly efficient integrated thermoelectric thin film power generators and cooling devices with an extremely high density of thermoelectric elements at nanoscale for high-efficiency thermal-to-electrical energy conversion and solid-state cooling in Naval applications.
Methods:
Ultra-high-vacuum E-beam/thermal evaporations are used to grow the nanoscale multilayered thin films such as Bi2Te3/Sb2Te3, Bi2Te3/Bi2Te3-xSex, and Si1-xGex/Ge.
Clean room-based nanofabrication techniques such as UV and e-beam lithography are used to fabricate the integrated TE devices.
The integrated TE devices will consist of thousands to millions of TE elements, where each TE element is fabricated with the multilayered thin films, and has 20 to 1000 nm by 20 to 1000 nm in dimensions.
Fig. 1. (a) Multilayered film with alternating layers: (b) High-resolution TEM (HRTEM) image of a multilayer film grown by e-beam evaporation.
Fig. 3. An integrated TE device. (a) an picture of part of the fabricated device, (b) a schematic of a pair of TE element, and SEM image of a fabricated TE device.
Fig. 2. (a) Working principle for an integrated TE device.
Navy-Relevant:
Thermoelectric power devices can be used for the Navy’s applications because of their capability for application in unusual situation and areas such as undersea, where conventional power sources can’t work well.
The high-efficiency integrated TE cooling device can be used for the application in the solid-state cooling and temperature stabilizing of the Navy’s instrument electronics, so that the instrument electronics can function better with higher speed and longer lifetime.

3. Reasons Why We Were Successful in the Proposal Submission Process
The possible major reasons include:
We had discussions with the ONR scientist about our proposed research and how it is related to the Navy’s application, and obtained advices and support from the ONR scientist to develop the proposal, so that the project is truly Navy-relevant.
During the proposal development, we had weekly teleconference with Mr. Smith, Director of DON’s HBCU/MI Program, and asked any question we had in developing the technical and cost proposals. Mr. Smith answered all our questions, so that we can submit a strong proposal, which meets all the requirements in the solicitation without missing anything.
The proposed research is cutting-edge research in nanofabrication and nanotechnology, is highly interesting to the research community, and can have important applications in Navy.
The proposal was written and organized with clear description of the research objectives, statement of work, proposed approaches and justification, expected research results, applications in Navy, educational activities, and student mentoring.
Acknowledgements:
We thank Mr. Smith very much for his great efforts as the Director of DON’s HBCUs/MI Program in helping HBCUs/MI and us! and thank him very much for his time and great support and kind help for us in developing the proposal!
We thank the Office of Naval Research (ONR) for the funding support!