Abstract
There is a strong motivation for investigating polycrystalline tin selenide (SnSe) as a high-performance thermoelectric material, since excellent performance (ZT ∼ 2.6) was observed in its single crystal. However, there is a large discrepant thermoelectric performance between single crystalline and polycrystalline SnSe. In this paper, the thermoelectric properties of polycrystalline Sn1−x Ge x Se were investigated, since forming a solid solution is a potential way to optimize thermoelectric performance. Our study shows that the introduction of Ge has a mild effect on the reduction of thermal conductivity, while the power factor is significantly deteriorated (1.87 μW cm−1 K−2 @823 K for the Sn0.92Ge0.08Se), owing to the reduced carrier concentration (0.66 × 1017 cm−3). The peak ZT of the prepared materials is 0.6 for Sn0.96Ge0.04Se at 823 K.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11304327, 11404348, 11404350, and 11234012), Ningbo Municipal Natural Science Foundation (No. 2014A610011), Ningbo Science and Technology Innovation Team (Nos. 2014B82004), and the Zhejiang Provincial Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (LR16E020001).
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Fu, Y., Xu, J., Liu, GQ. et al. Study on Thermoelectric Properties of Polycrystalline SnSe by Ge Doping. J. Electron. Mater. 46, 3182–3186 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-017-5404-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-017-5404-1