Group News

• Oct 10, 2025 Anirudh defended his Master's degree thesis on transverse TE materials with a great success. Big congrats to Anirudh!

• Oct 6, 2025 Nilesh defended his Master's degree thesis on 3-omega method for cross-plane thermal conductivity of 3D graphene films with a huge success. Big congrats, Nilesh!

• Sep 23-24, 2025 Dr. Bahk visited ENSEM at University of Lorraine, France to give a talk about the TEC group's thermoelectrics research and also give a seminar on dual Master's degree program established between UC and University of Lorraine. See pictures from Dr. Bahk's ENSEM visit.

• Sep 17, 2025 Dr. Bahk visited Dr. Dario Narducci's group at University of Milano - Bicocca in Milan, Italy, to give a seminar about hierarchical ceramic composites for thermoelectrics.

• July 23, 2025 Senior/graduate students from Ming Chi University of Technology, Taiwan, visited UC to attend the preparatory summer classes for dual Master's degree program with UC. Dr. Bahk gave them a lecture about semiconductor sensor technologies. 

• May 19-22,2024 Dr. Bahk attended the 247th ECS Meeting held in Montreal, Canada to give an invited talk and chair a session on low-dimensional carbons for energy harvesting.

• Nov 12-14,2024 Dr. Bahk attended IEEE PAINE 2024 held in Huntsville, AL and chaired a technical session at the conference.

• Oct 28, 2024 Dr. Bahk and Dr. Marc Cahay attended the NNCI Infrastructure Convening held at University of Louisville, KY to discuss the future directions of NNCI infrastructure.

• Oct 25, 2024 Dr. Babak Anasori from Purdue University visited MME Department for a seminar and our TEC lab for collaboration on MXenes. 

• Oct 21-24, 2024 Dr. Bahk attended the Department of Energy Building Technology Office (BTO) Peer Review held in Washington DC.

• Sep 13, 2024 Dr. Mona Zebarjadi from University of Virginia visited MME Department for a seminar and our TEC lab for collaboration.

• Jul 30-31, 2024 Dr. Bahk, Ahmad, and Anirudh attended the 2024 NNCI Nano + Additive Manufacturing Summit held in Louisville, KY. Ahmad gave an oral presentation on his research on graphene 3D structure-based wicks for electronics cooling, and Anirudh gave a talk as well about transverse TE materials based on tilted Ti nanorods and PEDOT:PSS. Dr. Bahk served in the organizing committee of the Summit. The UC Office of Research officially supported this Summit as a gold sponsor. See pictures here.

• Jul. 11, 2024 Thiraj successfully defended his M.S. thesis on thermoelectric air conditioning systems. Congrats! 

• Jun. 28, 2024 Nitin defended his M.S. thesis on CNT fabric thermoelectrics with a huge success. Congrats!

• May 29, 2024 Dr. Bahk attended the 245th Electrochemical Society (ECS) Meeting held in San Francisco, CA to give an invited talk on carrier transport in carbon nanostructures, and co-chair Session B01 - Carbon Nanostructures for Energy Conversion and Storage. 

• Jan. 8, 2023 Anirudh joined TEC lab as a new M.S. student in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!

• Nov. 25, 2023 Ahmad et al. on TE waste heat recovery from gas turbine was published in MDPI Entropy, and selected as a cover of Vol. 25, Issue 12. Big congrats!

• Nov. 3, 2023 Dr. Kevin Walsh, Associate Dean of Engineering Research and Fife Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Louisville, visited UC for MME Distinguished Seminar and toured our labs/facilities including Digital Futures. 

• Oct. 24-25, 2023 Dr. Bahk attended IEEE PAINE 2023 in Huntsville, AL and served in the best paper award committee.

• Oct. 16, 2023 Dr. Bahk visited Dr. Jeong-Hoi Koo's lab at Miami University and toured facilities/labs of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Department.

• Oct. 13, 2023 Dr. Bahk gave a talk about his PRP-funded research on CNT fabric for firefighter jacket cooling  (Nitin et al.) at the PRP Symposium 2023.

• Oct. 1-3, 2023 Dr. Bahk attended MS&T 2023 in Columbus, OH.

More group news...

What is Thermoelectric Energy Conversion?

Thermoelectric energy conversion is a solid-state technology that converts heat into electricity. With this technology, waste heat from heat engines in vehicles or power plants can be partially recovered to generate extra electric power, thereby increasing the energy efficiency. When used on human body, human body-heat can be converted into electricity as well, which might be sufficient to power a small bio-medical sensor. You won't need a battery to power those devices anymore! For more information, read our recent review paper on wearable thermoelectric energy harvesting.

Another great example of utilizing thermoelectric energy conversion technology is Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) used in space probes such as Cassini and New Horizons. Find more information on the wikipedia page.

Thermoelectric devices have unique advantages such as

• no moving parts, therefore noiseless and robust

• directly converting heat to electricity or vice versa with no fluid involved

• can be made flexible to conformally attach onto a curved surface

• can be made very small at the micro/nano-scale with very high cooling power density

Please view the following YouTube videos for our ultra-fast transient thermal imaging results of micro-heater lines.