2025/11/20 by Oh, Alex J., Stoddard, Colby J., Queenan, Craig +1
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Advanced Thermoelectric Materials and Devices #Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Physics Education (physics.ed-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.16491
openalex publication_date 2025/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Thermoelectric materials can convert thermal energy into electricity, making them promising candidates for harvesting waste heat, an increasingly important challenge in the energy-intensive modern world. The search for improved thermoelectric materials is therefore an active area of research in materials physics. Despite their fundamental and practical significance, thermoelectric properties - such as the Seebeck coefficient and power factor - are rarely explored in student labs due to the complexity in measurement schemes and requirement for sophisticated equipment. In this work, we present a user-friendly, low-cost and efficient thermoelectric measurement system built with Arduino and LabVIEW, which can simultaneously measure Seebeck coefficients and power factors as a function of temperature. This was made possible by improving the resolution of Arduino over ~1000 times with amplifiers and noise reduction schemes. With a total cost of only ~100 and simple measurement protocols, this setup is well suited not only for student labs but also for efficient thermoelectric research.