Enhanced thermoelectric performance of solution-derived bismuth telluride based nanocomposites via liquid-phase sintering
Bismuth telluride based thermoelectric materials show great promise in electricity generation from waste heat and solid-state refrigeration, but improving their conversion efficiency with economical approaches for widespread use remains a challenge. An economical facile bottom-up approach has been d...
| Autores: | , , , , , , , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2016 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:200978 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/200978 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1016/j.nanoen.2016.10.056 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Bismuth telluride Bottom-up Liquid-phase sintering Nanocomposites Thermoelectric materials |
| Sumario: | Bismuth telluride based thermoelectric materials show great promise in electricity generation from waste heat and solid-state refrigeration, but improving their conversion efficiency with economical approaches for widespread use remains a challenge. An economical facile bottom-up approach has been developed to obtain nanostructured powders, which are used to build bulk thermoelectric materials. Using excess tellurium as sacrificial additive to enable liquid-phase sintering in the spark plasma sintering process, the lattice and bipolar contributions to the thermal conductivity are both greatly reduced without compromising too much the power factor, which leads to the achievement of high figure of merit (ZT) in both n-type and p-type bismuth telluride based nanocomposites. The ZT values are 1.59±0.16 for p-type Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3 and 0.98±0.07 for n-type Bi2Te2.7Se0.3 at 370 K, which are significantly high for bottom-up approaches. These results demonstrate that solution-chemistry approaches as facile, scalable and low-energy-intensive ways to achieve nanopowders, combined with liquid-phase sintering process, can open up great possibilities in developing high-performance low-price thermoelectric bulk nanocomposites. |
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