Single metal thermocouples (SMTs) have recently been developed with a new design concept of width-engineering of metal segments. In such designs, two segments of different micro-width are formed to obtain different levels of Seebeck effects. The variations in the Seebeck effect achieved from dissimilar segment width are small. In addition, the fabrication of such micro-width patterns requires special fabrication facilities such as photolithography or electron-beam lithography. In this paper, an alternative method is presented that has the potential to give high thermal sensing SMTs and requires no sophisticated facilities to fabricate. The method is based on thickness-engineering instead of width-engineering, and thus devices can be obtained from commonly available thin film deposition techniques. Constructing better thermal sensing SMTs is possible with this approach as thickness can be easily and conveniently varied down to nanoscale range which is necessary to achieve significant changes in the Seebeck effects from effectively utilizing size effects. As a result, a high thermal sensing bismuth based-SMT has been fabricated with a sensitivity of as high as 31 μV K⁻¹, one of the highest values reported for SMTs. It is straightforward, more convenient over width-engineering approach and thus SMTs can be easily developed.

最近开发了单金属热电偶 (SMT)，采用了金属段宽度工程的新设计概念。在这样的设计中，形成两个不同微宽度的段以获得不同程度的塞贝克效应。从不同的段宽度获得的塞贝克效应的变化很小。此外，这种微宽图案的制造需要特殊的制造设备，例如光刻或电子束光刻。在本文中，提出了一种替代方法，它具有提供高热感 SMT 的潜力，并且不需要复杂的设备来制造。该方法基于厚度工程而不是宽度工程，因此可以从常用的薄膜沉积技术获得器件。使用这种方法可以构建更好的热传感 SMT，因为厚度可以轻松方便地改变到纳米级范围，这是通过有效利用尺寸效应实现赛贝克效应显着变化所必需的。因此，已经制造出灵敏度高达 31 的高热敏铋基 SMTμ V K ^-1，SMT 报告的最高值之​​一。它比宽度工程方法更简单、更方便，因此可以轻松开发 SMT。