Dongkyu Lee
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Materials Science·Early-career
Nearly two-thirds of all energy humans generate is lost as heat. Thermoelectric materials can turn some of that waste heat directly into electricity.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
thermoelectrics
thermoelectric materials
waste heat recovery
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Test whether tensile strain along vertical interfaces in perovskite nanocomposites grown by pulsed laser deposition increases oxygen vacancies and boosts electrical conductivity in electron-doped oxides.
- Determine whether metal nanoparticles exsolved from A-site-deficient perovskites during chemical reduction raise thermopower through energy filtering of electrons without major loss of conductivity.
- Establish how strain, redox defects and thermoelectric properties relate in transition metal oxides, to find designs that overcome the trade-off between thermopower and conductivity.
More about the research
Their usefulness depends on two properties: thermopower, the voltage produced per degree of temperature difference, and electrical conductivity. Improving one usually worsens the other. Transition metal oxides, metal-oxygen compounds that are non-toxic, abundant and stable at high temperatures, are attractive candidates, but they still struggle to combine both properties.
Why it matters
Recovering energy from waste heat in high-temperature settings could provide a cleaner, more sustainable power source. By working out how strain and defects can raise both thermopower and conductivity, this work could guide design of non-toxic, abundant oxide materials for high-temperature thermoelectric devices and other energy and electronic applications.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jian Liu
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Physics·Early-career
Grow atomically thin iridium oxide layers by in-situ-monitored pulsed-laser deposition, designed so that spin-orbit coupling tilts the spins while overall spin symmetry is kept.
Jason Nicholas
Michigan State University, MI·Materials Science
Test whether the previously observed shift in the wadsleyite-to-ringwoodite transformation can be reproduced in anhydrous Mg2SiO4 thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition, using diamond anvil cells with synchrotron X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy.
Derek Meyers
Oklahoma State University, OK·Physics·Early-career
Synthesize ruthenate heterostructures confined along atypical crystallographic orientations by pulsed laser deposition, adapting growth to stabilize the films despite polarity mismatch between stacked oxide layers.
The school
University of South Carolina-Columbia: 22 labs on PI Pages, $277M a year on research, 425 research doctorates a year.
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