Combination of large nanostructures and complex band structure for high performance thermoelectric lead telluride
Abstract
The complexity of the valence band structure in p-type PbTe has been shown to enable a significant enhancement of the average thermoelectric figure of merit (zT) when heavily doped with Na. It has also been shown that when PbTe is nanostructured with large nanometer sized Ag_2Te precipitates there is an enhancement of zT due to phonon scattering at the interfaces. The enhancement in zT resulting from these two mechanisms is of similar magnitude but, in principle, decoupled from one another. This work experimentally demonstrates a successful combination of the complexity in the valence band structure with the addition of nanostructuring to create a high performance thermoelectric material. These effects lead to a high zT over a wide temperature range with peak zT > 1.5 at T > 650 K in Na-doped PbTe/Ag_2Te. This high average zT produces 30% higher efficiency (300–750 K) than pure Na-doped PbTe because of the nanostructures, while the complex valence band structure leads to twice the efficiency as the related n-type La-doped PbTe/Ag_2Te without such band structure complexity.
Additional Information
© 2011 The Royal Society of Chemistry. Received 9th June 2011, Accepted 11th July 2011. First published on the web 29 Jul 2011. The authors gratefully acknowledge NASA-JPL and DARPA for funding support of this work.Attached Files
Published - Pei2011p15892Energ_Environ_Sci.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 25480
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110929-064323922
- NASA/JPL
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- Created
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2011-09-29Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field