Thermoelectric generators and their applications: Progress, challenges, and future prospects

Our community currently deals with issues such as rising electricity costs, pollution, and global warming. Scientists work to improve energy harvesting-based power generators in order to reduce their impacts. The Seebeck effect has been used to illustrate the capacity of thermoelectric generators (TEGs) to directly convert thermal energy to electrical energy. They are also ecologically beneficial since they do not include chemical products, function quietly because they lack mechanical structures and/or moving components, and may be built using different fabrication technologies such as three-dimentional (3D) printing, silicon technology, and screen printing, etc. TEGs are also position-independent and have a long operational lifetime. TEGs can be integrated into bulk and flexible devices. This review gives further investigation of TEGs, beginning with a full discussion of their operating principle, kinds, materials utilized, figure of merit, and improvement approaches, which include various thermoelectric material arrangements and utilised technologies. This paper also discusses the use of TEGs in a variety of disciplines such as automobile and biomedical.