Facile synthesis and high thermoelectric performance of tellurium with antimony doping

• Published in: Journal of alloys and compounds 2021-12, Vol.887, p.161342, Article 161342
• Main Authors: Yang, Manman, Su, Taichao, Li, Shuai, Li, Shangsheng, Hu, Meihua, Liu, Xiaobing
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antimony; Carrier density; Chemical composition; Chemical synthesis; Crystal defects; Doping; High pressure; Tellurium; Thermal conductivity; Thermoelectric; Thermoelectricity
• ISSN: 0925-8388; 1873-4669
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jallcom.2021.161342

•Polycrystalline Te doped with Sb was facile and fast prepared by one-step high-pressure technique.•Comparing with the samples obtained by the conventional preparation method, the carrier concentration of high pressure synthesized Te is more sensitive to dopants.•An extremal low thermal conductivity ~0.59 W m−1 K−1 and an enhanced figure of merit, ZT ~ 0.88 were achieved @600 K in the case of Te doped with 0.3 mol% Sb. Besides high thermoelectric (TE) performance, simple chemical compositions and facile synthesis methods are attractive for practical fabrication and applications of TE materials due to their effective rates of synthesis and higher stabilities. Element semiconductor Tellurium (Te) is one potential middle temperature TE material and has attracted wide interest in material science. In this study, we report that a high thermoelectric performance ZT ~ 0.88@600 K for polycrystalline Te with slight Antimony (Sb) doping was facile synthesized by one-step high pressure technique. Our experimental results reveal that the carrier concentration of high pressure synthesized Te is more sensitive to dopants compared with the samples obtained by the conventional preparation method. We observed large amount of nanograins, second nano-phase and crystal defects in the high pressure synthetic samples, which can significantly weaken the phonon thermal conductivity, leading to a high TE performance in Te samples. This work indicates that high pressure method provides an alternative direction for designing TE materials with simple composition.