Abstract
The thermoelectric properties of multiple core-shell nanowires are investigated by using nonequilibrium Green's function method and molecular dynamics simulations. The results show that the thermoelectric performance of multiple core-shell NWs can be improved observably with the increase of shell number compared with the single component NWs due to the significant reduction of phonon thermal conductance. The ZT value of multiple core-shell NWs can reach three times greater than that of the single component GaSb NWs at room temperature. Moreover, the ZT values of both the core-shell NWs and single component NWs are increased with the increasing temperature, but the ZT value of core-shell NWs increases more slowly than that of single component NWs. These results show that the single component NWs is suitable as thermoelectric material at much high temperature, but the multiple core-shell NWs is more suitable as thermoelectric material at room temperature.
Highlights
The thermoelectric properties of multiple core-shell nanowires are investigated by using nonequilibrium Green’s function method and molecular dynamics simulations
The results show that the thermoelectric performance of multiple core-shell NWs can be improved observably with the increase of shell number compared with the single component NWs due to the significant reduction of phonon thermal conductance
These results show that the single component NWs is suitable as thermoelectric material at much high temperature, but the multiple core-shell NWs is more suitable as thermoelectric material at room temperature
Summary
The thermoelectric properties of multiple core-shell nanowires are investigated by using nonequilibrium Green’s function method and molecular dynamics simulations. The results show that the thermoelectric performance of multiple core-shell NWs can be improved observably with the increase of shell number compared with the single component NWs due to the significant reduction of phonon thermal conductance. Primary interest in nanowires is motivated by the significantly suppressed phonon thermal conductivity due to the phonon-boundary scattering and possible phononics engineering[19,20,21] Another advantage of nanowires is a high power factor due to enhanced electrical density of states near the Fermi level, which is caused by quantum confinement[5]. The high mobility and low phonon thermal conductance may give us an opportunity to improve the thermoelectric properties of the NWs. there are only a few theoretical studies on the thermoelectric properties of Si/Ge core-shell NWs24–26, and the thermoelectric properties in multiple core-shell NWs are still in its infancy.
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