Abstract
Depending on the application of bismuth telluride thermoelectric materials in cooling, waste heat recovery, or wearable electronics, their material properties, and geometrical dimensions should be designed to optimize their performance. Recently, thermoelectric materials have gained a lot of interest in wearable electronic devices for body heat harvesting and cooling purposes. For efficient wearable electronic devices, thermoelectric materials with optimum properties, i.e., low thermal conductivity, high Seebeck coefficient, and high thermoelectric figure-of-merit (zT) at room temperature, are demanded. In this paper, we investigate the effect of glass inclusion, microwave processing, and annealing on the synthesis of high-performance p-type (BixSb1−x)2Te3 nanocomposites, optimized specially for body heat harvesting and body cooling applications. Our results show that glass inclusion could enhance the room temperature Seebeck coefficient by more than 10% while maintaining zT the same. Moreover, the combination of microwave radiation and post-annealing enables a 25% enhancement of zT at room temperature. A thermoelectric generator wristband, made of the developed materials, generates 300 μW power and 323 mV voltage when connected to the human body. Consequently, MW processing provides a new and effective way of synthesizing p-type (BixSb1−x)2Te3 alloys with optimum transport properties.
Highlights
Thermoelectric (TE) materials are able to generate electricity from a temperature gradient directly. The quality of these materials is defined by dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit which is defined by zT = (S2 σ/κ)T, where S, σ, κ and T are the Seebeck coefficient, electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and absolute temperature, respectively
The effect of the addition of different glass inclusions on thermoelectric properties of (Bix Sb1−x )2 Te3 is studied
Compared to conventional TE materials, spark sintering (SPS)-MW-A40 sample demonstrated ~50% reduction in thermal conductivity and 33% improvement in zT at room temperature while maintaining a similar Seebeck coefficient that enables the application of this material as wearable power generators and coolers where high contact resistance is involved [39]
Summary
Thermoelectric (TE) materials are able to generate electricity from a temperature gradient directly. TE materials that are widely used for cooling and low-temperature power generation applications. Various studies showed enhanced TE properties in BiSbTe alloys through different synthesis methods via the reduction of thermal conductivity and/or power factor enhancement [3,4,5,6,7]. Nanocomposites are designated to a broad class of materials; in thermoelectrics, they are generally considered as materials that contain nano-grains or nano-features as the second phase in their. Nanocomposites are designated to a broad class of materials; in thermoelectrics,2they of 12 are generally considered as materials that contain nano-grains or nano-features as the second phase in their matrix. For the wearable platform, the TE properties of materials should be optimized to most efficiently at room temperature.
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