Grain Boundary Engineering for Achieving High Thermoelectric Performance in n-Type Skutterudites
Xianfu Meng,Zihang Liu,Bo Cui,Dandan Qin,Huiyuan Geng,Wei Cai,Liangwei Fu,Jiaqing He,Zhifeng Ren,Jiehe Sui +9 more
TLDR
In this paper, a liquid phase compaction method is used to fabricate low-angle grain boundaries with dense dislocation arrays, which shows the typical feature of lowangle grain boundary with denser dislocation array.Abstract:
Grain or phase boundaries play a critical role in the carrier and phonon transport in bulk thermoelectric materials. Previous investigations about controlling boundaries primarily focused on the reducing grain size or forming nanoinclusions. Herein, liquid phase compaction method is first used to fabricate the Yb-filled CoSb3 with excess Sb content, which shows the typical feature of low-angle grain boundaries with dense dislocation arrays. Seebeck coefficients show a dramatic increase via energy filtering effect through dislocation arrays with little deterioration on the carrier mobility, which significantly enhances the power factor over a broad temperature range with a high room-temperature value around 47 μW cm−2 K−1. Simultaneously, the lattice thermal conductivity could be further suppressed via scattering phonons via dense dislocation scattering. As a result, the highest average figure of merit ZT of ≈1.08 from 300 to 850 K could be realized, comparable to the best reported result of single or triple-filled Skutterudites. This work clearly points out that low-angle grain boundaries fabricated by liquid phase compaction method could concurrently optimize the electrical and thermal transport properties leading to an obvious enhancement of both power factor and ZT.read more
Citations
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References
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Enhancement of thermoelectric properties by energy filtering: Theoretical potential and experimental reality in nanostructured ZnSb
Kristian Berland,Xin Song,Patricia Almeida Carvalho,Clas Persson,Terje G. Finstad,Ole Martin Løvvik,Ole Martin Løvvik +6 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the potential of energy filtering in a specific material (ZnSb) by a combination of first-principles atomic-scale calculations, Boltzmann transport theory, and experimental studies of the same system.
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Solidification contraction-free synthesis for the Yb0.15Co4Sb12 bulk material
H. Y. Geng,S. Ochi,J. Q. Guo +2 more
TL;DR: In this article, the solidification contraction and feeding ability of Yb partially filled CoSb3 skutterudite alloys were studied and it was found that the pore formation was mainly due to the large solidification expansion during the L+CoSb→CoS b2 peritectic phase transition and the primary dendrite networks.
Journal ArticleDOI
Enhanced thermoelectric performance of p-type filled skutterudites via the coherency strain fields from spinodal decomposition
TL;DR: In this article, the coherency strain fields arising from spinodal decomposition can improve simultaneously the electronic density of states (DOS) near the Fermi level and the phonon-scattering rate in p-type filled skutterudites.
Journal ArticleDOI
Enhancement of thermoelectric properties by energy filtering: Theoretical potential and experimental reality in nanostructured ZnSb
Kristian Berland,Xin Song,Patricia Almeida Carvalho,Clas Persson,Terje G. Finstad,Ole Martin Løvvik,Ole Martin Løvvik +6 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the potential of energy filtering in a specific material (ZnSb) by a combination of first-principles atomic-scale calculations, Boltzmann transport theory, and experimental studies of the same system and found that the power factor could be enhanced by an order of magnitude when the filter barrier height was 0.5~eV.