High-throughput screening of room temperature active Peltier cooling materials in Heusler compounds

Abstract

Active Peltier cooling enables Peltier heat transfer in addition to the traditional Fourier thermal conductance, which is useful in some special applications, such as the microthermostats. From the material wise, however, the study on the active Peltier cooling materials is rare. We carried out a high-throughput workflow to screen out 5 room-temperature active Peltier cooling materials, GaSbLi2, HgPbCa2, SnTiRu2, GeYbLi2, and GeTiFe2, from 2958 Heusler materials. All the five materials are semimetals or very narrow band gap systems with high electrical conductivity. Some of these materials have relatively large Seebeck coefficients due to the band asymmetry. Their effective thermal conductivity κeffs, which are the summation of active Peltier thermal conductivity and passive thermal conductivity, are all greater than Cu at the room temperature and ΔT = 1 K. The present work gives a possible way to search active cooling Peltier materials for the applications of precise temperature control.