https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13391-023-00454-z
Friday 1st September was already a momentous day in my stay at Nottingham, marking three years since I first started as a Nottingham Research Fellow (NRF). However its real notable event was the open access publication of my colleague Dr. Carl (Yaoyang) Hu’s paper on a new class of soluble, printable thermoelectric ink under the direction of Prof Simon Woodward. This is the first publication where my NRF work on the measurement of thermoelectric materials properties has featured directly.
I have good memories of Carl bringing me films of his new material to test out on my Seebeck measurement rig which was very new and very rudimentary at that time. Luckily, my experimental setup improved somewhat and Carl was one of the number of chemists who would come and use the Seebeck equipment independently in its current life as the Interdisciplinary Transport Lab. He has in fact gone on to do a whole, separate, two year postdoc and moved on to his own industrial position since then: this work did indeed spend a long time in peer review and revisions before finding a great home in Electronic Materials Letters.
Carl synthesised and developed a previously unseen material in the form of a ladder oligomer which was termed a “Ba(Ni-ett)” (ett = 1,1,2,2-ethenetetrathiolate)). Whilst its thermoelectric properties are modest at room temperature, it represents a unique step forward in the synthesis of n-type thermoelectric materials and will hopefully inspire further efforts in this area. It is soluble and inkjet printable (the work is a collaboration with Nottingham colleagues specialising in additive manufacturing) and so it represents an excellent template for versatile new thermoelectrics.
Well done Carl!
Dr. Michael P. Weir 