Gunadhor Singh Okram

Title : Thermoelectrics near room temperature

Abstract:

Major challenge today is the global warming apprehensions due to the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem from the harmful gases such as CO₂ or SO₂ and by-products released from numerous human activities. The global efforts today in this are to decrease systematically the use of polluting sources of energy while encouraging to use non-polluting sources of energy/ devises such as solar energy, hydroelectric power and thermoelectricity, which in turn attracts lots of overall interest. Towards this endeavour, we also have investigated extensively on thermoelectricity near room temperature in our laboratory. For this, we have designed several new materials with exciting results on polyol method-prepared nanocomposites of non-toxic, naturally abundant and inexpensive elements through introduction of n-type Bi_4.8Cu_2.94S₉ in n-type Bi₂S₃, semi-metallic Bi in n-type Bi₂S₃, n-type Ag₂S in p-type CuS and metallic Ag in n-type Ag₂S, thermal decomposition method-prepared Bi₂Te₃-BiTe nanocomposites of different particle sizes and so on. They are likely to open up new vistas for development of near-room temperature yet non-toxic and solution-processed thermoelectric. Some of these shall be discussed.

What will audience learn from your presentation?

• The audience can learn how these nanocomposites be easily prepared in laboratory, yet non-toxic, naturally abundant, low cost and in versatile manner.
• The audience can start their research with less budget yet with high quality.
• This research could be used to expand their research or teaching.
• This will provide a practical solution to a problem that could simplify their problems or make a designer’s job more efficient.

It will improve the accuracy of a design, or provide new information to assist in a design problem such as control of the composition of the nanocomposites, particle size, particle shape and structure by simply changing the reaction conditions as reactant quantity, surfactant, reaction temperature and so on.

Biography:

Dr. G. S. Okram did his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1995). He worked at National Institute of Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan as an STA Fellow (1996-98) and other two research institutes before joining the UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research, Indore in Madhya Pradesh of India in 2001. He guided four PhDs, 6 MPhils, 4 M Tech, 54 MSc and 5 BSc project students, delivered over 88 invited lectures at different national and international (web) conferences, reviewed several reputed journal papers, published over 144 peer-reviewed (reputed) journal papers and 117 conference proceeding presentations with 2126 times citations.