Optimizing magnetocaloric and thermoelectric performance of MnCoGe/BiSbTe composites by regulating magnetostructural transition and element diffusion

Abstract

Composites consisted of MnCoGe magnetocaloric alloy and BiSbTe thermoelectric alloy were prepared to explore their potential use in all-solid-state cooling. It was found that in the composites the phase transition of MnCoGe from orthorhombic to hexagonal phase causes a large drop of magnetostructural transition temperature from room temperature to 270 K. The diffusion of Mn into BiSbTe leads to the formation of interfacial phase Mn(Bi,Sb)2Te4 and doping effect that depresses the thermoelectric performance. By adopting a low-temperature sintering strategy, the phase transition was restricted and the doping effect due to Mn diffusion was alleviated. As a result, the magnetostructural transition temperature around 300 K is maintained and the room-temperature magnetocaloric and thermoelectric properties are simultaneously optimized. The maximum magnetic entropy change of 4.3 × 10−3 J kg−1 K−1 at 2.0 T and maximum ZT value of 0.81 at 384 K have been obtained on the composite incorporated with 1 wt% MnCoGe. This work demonstrates that the control of phase transition and the doping effect of MnCoGe is crucial in optimizing the thermo-electro-magnetic properties of MnCoGe/BiSbTe composites.