Bulk nanostructured materials have recently emerged as a new paradigm for improving the performance of existing thermoelectric materials. Here, we fabricated two kinds of bulk nanostructured thermoelectric materials by a bottom-up strategy and an in situ precipitation method, respectively. Binary PbTe was fabricated by a combination of chemical synthesis and hot pressing. The grain sizes of the hot pressed bulk samples varied from 200 nm to 400 nm, which significantly contributed to the reduction of thermal conductivity due to the enhanced boundary phonon scattering. The highest figure of merit ZT of the binary PbTe sample reached 0.8 at 580 K. Mg2(Si,Sn) solid solutions have shown great promise for thermoelectric application, due to good thermoelectric properties, non-toxicity, and abundantly available constituent elements. The nanoscale microstructure observation of the compounds showed the existence of nanophases formed in situ, which is believed to be related to the relatively low lattice thermal conductivity in this material system. The highest ZT of Sb-doped Mg2(Si,Sn) samples reached 1.1 at 770 K.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2007CB607502), the National ‘863’ Hi-tech. Program of China (2007AA 03Z234), NSFC (50971115) and the S&T Program of Zhejiang Province (2009C34007).
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Zhu, TJ., Cao, YQ., Zhang, Q. et al. Bulk Nanostructured Thermoelectric Materials: Preparation, Structure and Properties. J. Electron. Mater. 39, 1990–1995 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-009-1037-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-009-1037-3