Silver Telluride Nanowire Assembly for High‐Performance Flexible Thermoelectric Film and Its Application in Self‐Powered Temperature Sensor

Abstract

AbstractFlexible thermoelectric materials that enable harvesting electricity from human body heat or an ambient temperature gradient have potential applications in self‐powered flexible wearable electronics. The development of more efficient and flexible n‐type thermoelectric materials, however, is highly desired but challenging. Herein, reported is a nylon substrate supported fabric silver telluride (Ag2Te) nanowire network used as flexible n‐type thermoelectric materials, by the combination of vacuum filtrated assembly and mechanical pressing method. The prepared silver telluride nanowire films show optimal thermoelectric properties with the Seebeck coefficient of −129.5 µV K−1 and electrical conductivity of 187.78 S cm−1, leading to the highest power factor of 315.1 µW m−1 K2. Owing to the elimination of Peierls stress in the fabrics interlocking structure, the silver telluride nanowire films exhibit good flexibility, as the thermoelectric properties only have a change below 10% after 500 bending cycles. Based on the silver telluride nanowire film, a flexible self‐powered temperature sensor is fabricated for detecting the temperature from a human finger. The sensor shows high sensitivity that its response time and reset time are about 1.05 and 2.1 s, respectively. The results imply that silver telluride nanowire films have great potential applications in flexible thermoelectric energy conversion and self‐powered temperature sensing.