Abstract
Polymer thermoelectric (TE) composites have witnessed explosive developments in recent years, arising from their promising prospect for lightweight flexible electronics and capability of harvesting waste-heat. In sharp contrast with intrinsically conducting polymers (CPs), the insulating thermoplastics have seldom been employed as the matrices for flexible TE composites despite their advantages of low costs, controllable melt-flowing behaviors and excellent mechanical properties. Here, we report flexible films of polycarbonate/single-walled carbon nanotube (PC/SWCNT) composites with improved trade-off between TE and mechanical performances. The SWCNTs with 1D nanostructure were dramatically aligned by PC melt-flowing under hot-pressing in the radial direction. The composite maximum power factor reaches 4.8 ± 0.8 μW m−1 K−2 at 10 wt% SWCNTs in the aligned direction, which is higher than most previously reported thermoplastics-based TE composites at the same SWCNT loading and even comparable to some intrinsically CPs and their composites. In addition, these composites display significantly higher tensile modulus and strength than CPs and their composites. This study paves an effective way to fabricate flexible films of polymer composites with simultaneously high TE and mechanical performances via judicious alignment of SWCNTs in thermoplastic polymers.
Highlights
A recent increasing attention to flexible organic and composite thermoelectrics (TEs) mainly stems from their promising applications in complex environments to harvest low-quality heat and generate voltage upon exposure to small temperature gradients[1,2,3,4]
The PC/a-singlewalled CNT (SWCNT) composites are prepared by hot-pressing the flocculation, while the PC/r-SWCNT are fabricated by simple evaporation of the suspension
As for the PC/aligned SWCNT (a-SWCNT) composites with other SWCNT contents, Supplementary Fig. 4 confirms the significant alignment of the SWCNTs
Summary
A recent increasing attention to flexible organic and composite thermoelectrics (TEs) mainly stems from their promising applications in complex environments to harvest low-quality heat and generate voltage upon exposure to small temperature gradients[1,2,3,4]. The polymers in flexible TEs concentrate on intrinsically conducting polymers (CPs), including poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT), polyaniline (PANI), poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT), and polypyrrole (PPy)[11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. Compared with their boosting TE performance, little is known for the trade-off between TE and mechanical performances, mechanical property is definitely vital for practical applications[18]. To solve these intractable problems are urgent for flexible TE composites
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