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Strained endotaxial nanostructures with high thermoelectric figure of merit

Nature Chemistry volume 3, pages 160–166 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Thermoelectric materials can directly generate electrical power from waste heat but the challenge is in designing efficient, stable and inexpensive systems. Nanostructuring in bulk materials dramatically reduces the thermal conductivity but simultaneously increases the charge carrier scattering, which has a detrimental effect on the carrier mobility. We have experimentally achieved concurrent phonon blocking and charge transmitting via the endotaxial placement of nanocrystals in a thermoelectric material host. Endotaxially arranged SrTe nanocrystals at concentrations as low as 2% were incorporated in a PbTe matrix doped with Na2Te. This effectively inhibits the heat flow in the system but does not affect the hole mobility, allowing a large power factor to be achieved. The crystallographic alignment of SrTe and PbTe lattices decouples phonon and electron transport and this allows the system to reach a thermoelectric figure of merit of 1.7 at ~800 K.

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Figure 1: Electrical transport properties of PbTe-SrTe.
Figure 2: Thermal transport properties of PbTe–SrTe.
Figure 3: TEM and strain analysis of PbTe–SrTe.
Figure 4: ZT of PbTe–SrTe.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (grant N00014-08-1-0613). Transmission electron microscopy work was performed in the (EPIC) (NIFTI) (Keck-II) facility of NUANCE Center at Northwestern University. NUANCE Center is supported by NSF-NSEC, NSF-MRSEC, Keck Foundation, the State of Illinois, and Northwestern University. The work at the University of Michigan is supported as part of the Revolutionary Materials for Solid State Energy Conversion, an Energy frontier Research Center funded by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0001054.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208, Illinois, USA

    Kanishka Biswas, Jiaqing He, Qichun Zhang & Mercouri G. Kanatzidis

  2. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208, Illinois, USA

    Jiaqing He & Vinayak P. Dravid

  3. Department of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109, Michigan, USA

    Guoyu Wang & Ctirad Uher

  4. Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, 60439, Illinois, USA

    Mercouri G. Kanatzidis

Authors
  1. Kanishka Biswas
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Contributions

K.B., Q.Z. and M.G.K. prepared the samples, designed and carried out thermoelectric experiments. K.B. and M.G.K. analysed the electrical and thermal transport data. J.H. and V.P.D. carried out the TEM experiment and analysed the TEM data. G.W. and C.U. carried out the Hall measurements. K.B., J.H., V.P.D. and M.G.K. wrote the manuscript. All authors have reviewed, discussed and approved the results and conclusions of this article.

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Correspondence to Mercouri G. Kanatzidis.

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Biswas, K., He, J., Zhang, Q. et al. Strained endotaxial nanostructures with high thermoelectric figure of merit. Nature Chem 3, 160–166 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.955

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