Review of rapid fabrication methods of skutterudite materials

Abstract

Abstract Skutterudites are highly promising thermoelectric materials for mid-temperature range (400–850 K) applications because they exhibit one of the highest efficiencies of energy conversion at this temperature. It is well proven that skutterudite-based thermoelectric materials can be successfully synthesized using a combination of processing techniques that generally consist of two stages as follows: a) synthesis of the alloy (e.g., melting-quenching/annealing-grounding, and solid-state reaction) and b) final consolidation via various powder metallurgy techniques (e.g., hot pressing, spark plasma sintering, and pulse plasma sintering). The aforementioned fabrication processes are time- and energy-consuming due to their complex and multi-stage nature. The aim of the present study is to review recent rapid fabrication methods of skutterudite thermoelectric materials. Advantages and disadvantages of selected fabrication routes including gas atomization, selective laser melting, self-propagating high-temperature synthesis, melt-spinning, and hydrothermal synthesis were discussed and compared to those of conventional synthesis of skutterudite alloys. All the presented fabrication routes offer significant potential for large-scale scalability owing to their time and energy efficiencies that enable fast, low cost, and mass production of thermoelectric materials.