High thermoelectric performance by resonant dopant indium in nanostructured SnTe

From an environmental perspective, lead-free SnTe would be preferable for solid-state waste heat recovery if its thermoelectric figure-of-merit could be brought close to that of the lead-containing chalcogenides. In this work, we studied the thermoelectric properties of nanostructured SnTe with diff...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2013-08, Vol.110 (33), p.13261-13266
Main Authors: Zhang, Qian, Liao, Bolin, Lan, Yucheng, Lukas, Kevin, Liu, Weishu, Esfarjani, Keivan, Opeil, Cyril, Broido, David, Chen, Gang, Ren, Zhifeng
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alloys
Atoms
Ball milling
Charge carriers
Doping
Electric Conductivity
Electric properties
Electrical resistivity
Heat conductivity
Hot pressing
Iridium - chemistry
Materials Testing
Melting
Microscopy, Electron, Scanning
Models, Chemical
Nanostructures - chemistry
Physical Sciences
Seebeck effect
Simulation
solar (photovoltaic), solar (thermal), solid state lighting, phonons, thermal conductivity, thermoelectric, defects, mechanical behavior, charge transport, spin dynamics, materials and chemistry by design, optics, synthesis (novel materials), synthesis (self-assembly), synthesis (scalable processing)
Tellurium - chemistry
Temperature
Thermal conductivity
Thermoelectric power generation
Tin Compounds - chemistry
X-Ray Diffraction
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:From an environmental perspective, lead-free SnTe would be preferable for solid-state waste heat recovery if its thermoelectric figure-of-merit could be brought close to that of the lead-containing chalcogenides. In this work, we studied the thermoelectric properties of nanostructured SnTe with different dopants, and found indium-doped SnTe showed extraordinarily large Seebeck coefficients that cannot be explained properly by the conventional two-valence band model. We attributed this enhancement of Seebeck coefficients to resonant levels created by the indium impurities inside the valence band, supported by the first-principles simulations. This, together with the lower thermal conductivity resulting from the decreased grain size by ball milling and hot pressing, improved both the peak and average nondimensional figure-of-merit (ZT) significantly. A peak ZT of ∼1.1 was obtained in 0.25 atom % In-doped SnTe at about 873 K.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1305735110