Design Strategies for High-Performance Thermoelectric Materials

Disorder plays an essential role in thermoelectric materials, where dopants, defects, and structural inhomogeneity affect electronic and phonon transport. In this article, we review thermoelectric transport in disordered materials within the framework of the Kubo–Luttinger theory. We discuss three representative cases : impurity scattering in doped carbon nanotubes, carrier localization and variable-range hopping in the thiospinel CuCrTiS4, and structural inhomogeneity affecting phonon transport in Mg3Sb2- and GeTe-based materials. These examples illustrate how microscopic electronic states and scattering mechanisms are reflected in macroscopic thermoelectric coefficients. Such an understanding provides a basis for designing high-performance thermoelectric materials through the controlled use of disorder.