RUNNING HEAD: THERMOELECTRCS 1

Hahnbee Lee

April 17, 2018

Thermoelectrics

Objective: Begin data collection to conclude which wire is best.

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Materials and Methods

For the past 2 weeks, more experimentation has been done in creating efficient wires.

Each time we conducted another experimentation of another wire sample, something in the

apparatus was changed. For the vanadium oxide solution, we decided to get rid of the glass

substrate component because in a paper written by a scientist from University of California,

Berkeley the platinum component was directly attached to the circuit instead of wrapping it

around a glass substrate. Previously, when we realized that some of the vanadium electrolyte was

being deposited onto the glass substrate instead of the other way around. To prevent this from

happening we completely got rid of the glass substrate.

Figure 1 – Vanadium Oxide solution with wire directly connected to the current.

After this wire was electrodeposited, we finally electrodeposited onto a platinum wire by

using the ammonium metavanadate solution that we have been mixing for a while now (Figure

2). This proved to be more successful than the vanadium oxide solution for we saw more

qualitative data. We also decided to connect the wire directly to the circuit for this run also

because we found this to be make more logical sense.

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Figure 2 – Ammonium Metavanadate solution being used to electrodeposit.

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Data and Results

Today I will be using the total of 5 wires I have accumulated over the past weeks and

connecting them to another metal of another material and applying heat to them and observing

how much current I will get in response. I will also be doing the same for my pre-bought

thermocouples and observing how much more efficient they are in comparison to them. This will

be done using the Raspberry Pi and a code provided by Adafruit to measure the small currents

we will receive from the thermocouples. I will have quantitative results by the end of this week.

As of now, the “chemistry” components of the experiment have come to an halt and I will be

bringing most of my wires into the physics classroom to measure their efficiency.
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