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The goal of this chapter is to provide experimentalists a basic outline for analyzing/modeling thermoelectric transport at high temperatures. The simplest model is that developed for itinerant conduction in a single parabolic band (SPB). The SPB model is a powerful analytical tool when investigating thermoelectric transport. For instance, it can be used to guide the enhancement and/or optimization of thermoelectric efficiency, or the analysis results may suggest the presence of more complex behavior affecting the thermoelectric efficiency. There are, of course, many cases when the SPB model fails due to either multi-band effects [1, 2] or non-parabolicity.[3, 4, 5, 6, 7] The interested reader has many texts available for studying the physical origin of thermoelectric transport and the models obtained from the Boltzmann transport equation.[8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15]

A series of samples is not required to derive the parameters needed for a SPB model; indeed, it only takes data for a single sample. However, this modeling is best performed when a series of samples is available, as this allows the accuracy of the model to be tested. It is common for only a sample or two to be available, though, and in these cases the SPB model can suggest avenues to enhance the thermoelectric efficiency, such as increasing or decreasing the carrier density, and give a prediction for zT in an optimized sample.