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The discovery of advanced thermoelectric materials is the key bottleneck limiting the commercialization of solid-state technology for waste heat recovery and compression-free refrigeration. Computationally-driven approaches can accelerate the discovery of new thermoelectric materials and provide insights into the underlying structure–property relations that govern thermoelectric performance. We present TE Design Lab ( www.tedesignlab.org ), a thermoelectrics-focused virtual laboratory that contains calculated thermoelectric properties as well as performance rankings based on a metric (Yan et al., 2015) that combines ab initio calculations and modeled electron and phonon transport to offer a reliable assessment of the intrinsic material properties that govern the thermoelectric figure of merit zT. Another useful component of TE Design Lab is the suite of interactive web-based tools that enable users to mine the raw data and unearth new structure–property relations. Examples that illustrate this utility are presented. With the goal of establishing a close partnership between experiments and computations, TE Design Lab also offers resources to analyze raw experimental thermoelectric data and contribute them to the open access database.

In this work, we present the design and experimental results of a prototype latent heat thermal energy storage system. This prototype used 100 kg of aluminum-silicon as a phase change material with embedded heat pipes for effective heat transfer, a valved thermosyphon to control heat flow out of the thermal storage system, and a Stirling engine to convert heat to electricity. We tested this system for 11 simulated days of operation; each day included charging of the thermal storage tank, simultaneous electricity generation with heat input, and electricity generation from stored heat alone. On each simulated day, we set the engine to a different power level, allowing us to investigate the response of heat pipes and our valved thermosyphon to part-load conditions. The prototype demonstrated a maximum efficiency of 18.5% in converting stored heat to electricity, at a maximum power output of over 1 kW e . Extending these results to a commercial scale system with solar heat input, our modeling indicates that a discharge efficiency of over 30% and an annual efficiency of 18% could be achieved. This performance represents an advancement in established efficiency for any system that combines latent heat storage with electricity generation, and demonstrates that this system has potential for future commercial development.