Major encounter today is the global warming fears due to the damage of the earth’s ecosystem from the harmful gases such as CO₂ or SO₂ and by-products released from several human activities. The global determinations today in this are to decrease systematically the use of polluting sources of energy while encouraging to use non-polluting energy/ devises such as solar energy, hydroelectric power and thermoelectricity, which in turn attracts lots of overall interest. Towards this efforts, we also have investigated comprehensively in our laboratory on the thermoelectricity near room temperature. For this, we have designed several new materials with exciting results on polyol method-prepared nanocomposites of non-toxic, naturally abundant and inexpensive elements through introduction of n-type Bi_4.8Cu_2.94S₉ in n-type Bi₂S₃, semi-metallic Bi in n-type Bi₂S₃, n-type Ag₂S in p-type CuS and metallic Ag in n-type Ag₂S, thermal decomposition method-prepared Bi₂Te₃-BiTe nanocomposites of different particle sizes and so on. They are likely to open up new vistas for development of near-room temperature yet non-toxic and solution-processed thermoelectrics. Some of these aspects shall be discussed.

Dr. G. S. Okram did his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1995). He worked at Inter-University Accelerator Centre, new Delhi, India (1995-1996), National Institute of Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan as an STA Fellow (1996-98), and National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi, India (1999-2001) before joining the UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research, Indore in Madhya Pradesh state of India in 2001 Scientist D. He is now Scientist G. He guided four PhDs, 6 MPhils, 4 M Tech, 54 MSc and 5 BSc project students, delivered over 89 invited lectures at different national and international (web) conferences, reviewed several reputed journal papers, published over 144 peer-reviewed (reputed) journal papers and 117 conference proceeding presentations with 2154 times citations. His main interests presently are, among others, in the fundamental studies on Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science of nanostructured thermoelectric materials and other functional materials.