TE Design Lab: A virtual laboratory for thermoelectric material design

The discovery of advanced thermoelectric materials is the key bottleneck limiting the commercialization of solid-state technology for waste heat recovery and compression-free refrigeration. Computationally-driven approaches can accelerate the discovery of new thermoelectric materials and provide insights into the underlying structure-property relations that govern thermoelectric performance. We present TE Design Lab (www.tedesignlab.org), a thermoelectrics-focused virtual laboratory that contains calculated thermoelectric properties as well as performance rankings based on a metric (Yan et al., 2015) that combines ab initio calculations and modeled electron and phonon transport to offer a reliable assessment of the intrinsic material properties that govern the thermoelectric figure of merit zT. Another useful component of TE Design Lab is the suite of interactive web-based tools that enable users to mine the raw data and unearth new structure-property relations. Examples that illustrate this utility are presented. With the goal of establishing a close partnership between experiments and computations, TE Design Lab also offers resources to analyze raw experimental thermoelectric data and contribute them to the open access database.