A two-temperature model for thermoelectric effects and its consequences in practical applications (Q903251)

In recent papers, a two-temperature model for thermoelectric effects has been introduced, based on the assumption that both phonons and electrons behave as a mixture of gases flowing through a crystal lattice, each of them being endowed with its own temperature. In the present paper, a theoretical scrutiny of this model is done in order to point out its consequences on the Kelvin relations and in what situations a simplified version of that theoretical model can be used in practical applications. The authors give a deeper physical insight to each term entering in the equations and investigate in what situations some of them can be neglected. The forms of the entropy and of the entropy flux are derived by the usual Liu procedure.