Abstract
Thermoelectric materials enable the direct conversion between heat and electricity. SnTe is a promising candidate due to its high charge transport performance. Here, we prepared SnTe nanocomposites by employing an aqueous method to synthetize SnTe nanoparticles (NP), followed by a unique surface treatment prior NP consolidation. This synthetic approach allowed optimizing the charge and phonon transport synergistically. The novelty of this strategy was the use of a soluble PbS molecular complex prepared using a thiol-amine solvent mixture that upon blending is adsorbed on the SnTe NP surface. Upon consolidation with spark plasma sintering, SnTe-PbS nanocomposite is formed. The presence of PbS complexes significantly compensates for the Sn vacancy and increases the average grain size of the nanocomposite, thus improving the carrier mobility. Moreover, lattice thermal conductivity is also reduced by the Pb and S-induced mass and strain fluctuation. As a result, an enhanced ZT of ca. 0.8 is reached at 873 K. Our finding provides a novel strategy to conduct rational surface treatment on NP-based thermoelectrics.
Highlights
Thermoelectric materials, which can directly convert heat into electricity, are promising candidates for low-grade heat exploitation [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The presence of PbS complexes significantly compensates for the Sn vacancy and increases the average grain size of the nanocomposite, improving the carrier mobility
Our finding provides a novel strategy to conduct rational surface treatment on NP-based thermoelectrics
Summary
Thermoelectric materials, which can directly convert heat into electricity, are promising candidates for low-grade heat exploitation [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Significant progress has been made by applying different strategies to synergistically modify charge and phonon transport, including band convergence [8], all-scale hierarchical phonon scattering [9,10], optimizing materials with intrinsically low lattice thermal conductivities [11,12], etc. These strategies are mainly built on the top-down approach utilizing melting and sintering methods, which are time- and energy-consuming. One of the main issues is the lack of facile and effective means to tune charge carrier concentration [17]
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