Solution Of Thermal Pollution

I. Introduction The widespread use of fossil fuels recently causes ozone depletion, global warming, atmospheric pollution and worldwide energy shortage which are the serious environmental problems today (Dai, Zhou, and Liu, 2011). Harvesting low grade heat (LGH) from environmental sources such as waste heat from power plants, automobile engines and solar panel substrates, has proven a way to meet the demand in electrical energy (Xu, Liu, Lim, Qiao and Chen, 2012). About 25% of the energy is converted into useful energy in a normal gasoline engine for cars while the rest is rejected through coolant and exhaust gases as waste heat (Yang and Stabler, 2009). This huge amount of waste heat leads to thermal pollution and to solve these problems, it is necessary to facbricate low cost and eco friendly energy converter to deal with modern society (Xu, Liu, Lim, Qiao and Chen, 2012). One way to recover this lost energy is through thermoelectricity (Skomedal, 2013). Thermoelectric materials (TEM) directly convert thermal energy into electricity and vice versa through solid-state energy conversion. They are solutions to the crisis of energy and global climate changes (Chen, Xiong and Bai, 2010). In recent studies, inorganic materials such as bismuth -telluride (Bi-Te) and metal oxides have been investigated as thermoelectric material (Zebarjadi, Esfarjani, Dresselhaus, Ren, and Chen, 2012). Most of these inorganic TE materials show their performances at temperature