Effect of Ga doping on the thermoelectric performance of Cu3SbSe4

Abstract

The Cu3SbSe4 compound is an environmentally friendly and low-cost medium-temperature thermoelectric material, which is featured by its low thermal conductivity. The disadvantage of this compound lies in its intrinsic poor electrical transport property. In order to improve the electrical conductivity of Cu3SbSe4, in this work we are to increase its carrier concentration by one to two orders of magnitude though elemental doping. The sample composition of Cu2.95GaxSb1-xSe4 is designed to increase the hole carrier concentration by introducing Cu vacancies and substituting Ga3+ for Sb5+. The Cu2.95GaxSb1-xSe4 (x=0, 0.01, 0.02 and 0.04) samples are prepared by melting-quench method. The X-ray diffraction analysis indicates that the obtained samples are of single-phase with the tetragonal famatinite structure, and the energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy results show that the actual compositions of the samples are very close to their nominal compositions. The effect of Ga doping on the thermoelectric performance of Cu3SbSe4 compound is investigated systematically by electrical and thermal transport property measurements. According to our experimental results, the hole concentration of the sample is efficiently increased by substituting Sb with a small amount of Ga (x=0.01), which can not only substantially improve the electrical conductivity but also suppress the intrinsic excitation of the sample. The maximum power factor reaches 10 μW/cm·K2 at 625 K for the Ga doped sample with x=0.01, which is nearly twice as much as that of the sample free of Ga. Although the carrier concentration further increases with increasing Ga content, the hole mobility decreases dramatically with the Ga content increasing due to the increased hole effective mass and point defect scattering. Thus, the electrical transport properties of the samples deteriorate at higher Ga content, and the maximum power factors for the samples with x=0.02 and 0.04 reach 9 and 8 μW/cm·K2 at 625 K, respectively. The lattice thermal conductivities of the samples basically comply with the T-1 relationship, suggesting the phonon U-process is the dominant scattering mechanism in our samples. For the samples with x=0 and 0.01, the lattice thermal conductivities at high temperature deviate slightly from the T-1 curve due to the presence of intrinsic excitation. However, these deviations are eliminated for the samples with x=0.02 and 0.04 because the bipolar effect is effectively suppressed with the increasing of Ga content. Thus, Ga doping can reduce the bipolar thermal conductivity at high temperature by increasing the hole carrier concentration. Furthermore, the point defects introduced by Ga doping can also enhance the scattering of high-frequency phonons, leading to slightly reduced lattice thermal conductivities of Ga-doped samples at higher temperature. Finally, a maximum ZT value of 0.53 at 664 K is achieved in Ga-doped sample, which is 50% higher than that of the sample free of Ga.