Roadmap on thermoelectricity.

The increasing energy demand and the ever more pressing need for clean technologies of energy conversion 
pose one of the most urgent and complicated issues of our age. Thermoelectricity, namely the direct conversion 
of waste heat into electricity, is a promising technique based on a long-standing physical phenomenon, which 
still has not fully developed its potential, mainly due to the low efficiency of the process. In order to improve the 
thermoelectric performance, a huge effort is being made by physicists, materials scientists and engineers, with 
the primary aims of better understanding the fundamental issues ruling the improvement of the thermoelectric 
figure of merit, and finally building the most efficient thermoelectric devices.
In this Roadmap an overview is given about the most recent experimental and computational results obtained
within the Italian research community on the optimization of composition and morphology of some 
thermoelectric materials, as well as on the design of thermoelectric and hybrid thermoelectric/photovoltaic 
devices.&#xD.