  The paper describes preliminary investigations of a new effect in conducting
anisotropic liquids, which leads to thermoelectric conversion of energy.
Nematic liquid crystals with semiconducting dopes are used. A thermoelectric
figure of merit ZT = 0.2 is obtained in experiments. The effect can be
explained by assuming that the thermocurrent in semiconducting nematics, in
contrast to the Seebeck effect, is a nonlinear function of the temperature
gradient and of the temperature itself. Though the discovered effect has to be
further investigated, the data obtained suggest that it can be effectively used
in alternative energy engineering.
