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Detrimental effect of powder processing on the thermoelectric properties of CoSi

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Abstract

Cobalt monosilicide (CoSi) prepared by arc melting possesses a very high thermoelectric power factor of 60 μW cm−1 K−2 at room temperature. The high lattice thermal conductivity of CoSi, however, limits its thermoelectric efficiency. In this paper, powder processing technique was intentionally used to reduce the grain sizes of CoSi and thus suppress its lattice thermal conductivity. The effects on the thermoelectric properties of CoSi under various processing conditions were explored. The electrical resistivity is drastically increased, while the absolute Seebeck coefficient is decreased for the powder processed samples compared to the arc-melted one. The detrimental influence is attributed to the grain boundary defects produced during processing, which brings about an excessive energy filtering effect and hence induces a huge decrease in the absolute Seebeck coefficient. The lattice thermal conductivity of powder processed samples is reduced as expected. However, the reduction is always offset by the reduction in the mobility due to the similar mean free paths of electrons and phonons of CoSi. As a result, it may not be feasible to upgrade the thermoelectric performance of the CoSi system by powder processing.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported as part of the Center for Revolutionary Materials for Solid State Energy Conversion, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0001054. We also thank the sponsorship from the University Science Research Project of Anhui Province Under Project Number KJ2016A072.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Basic Teaching, Anhui Institute of Information Technology, Wuhu, 241000, Anhui, China

    Hui Sun

  2. College of Physics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 401331, China

    Xu Lu

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 48824, USA

    Donald T. Morelli

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  1. Hui Sun
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  2. Xu Lu
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  3. Donald T. Morelli
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Correspondence to Hui Sun.

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Sun, H., Lu, X. & Morelli, D.T. Detrimental effect of powder processing on the thermoelectric properties of CoSi. J Mater Sci 52, 8293–8299 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-017-1045-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-017-1045-2

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