Excessively Doped PbTe with Ge-Induced Nanostructures Enables High-Efficiency Thermoelectric Modules

By P. Jood, M. Ohta, Atsushi Yamamoto, M. Kanatzidis. Joule, 2018

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The application of thermoelectrics in waste heat recovery requires high conversion efficiency, which is best achieved through the combination of progressive performance-enhancing strategies. In this study, we combined engineered doping, nanostructuring, and module fabrication in PbTe-based thermoelectrics to generate high-ZT materials along with high-efficiency modules. The use of excess Na (4%) as a p-type dopant greatly enhanced the thermoelectric power factor by generating extra charge carriers at high temperature. The addition of minute amounts of Ge (≤1%) generated nanoprecipitates, which greatly reduced the lattice thermal conductivity. An optimal ZT of ∼1.9 at ∼805 K was achieved for Pb0.953Na0.040Ge0.007Te as a p-type leg, which was combined with PbTe0.9964I0.0036 as an n-type leg to fabricate thermoelectric modules. An exceptionally high efficiency of ∼12% for a temperature difference of 590 K was obtained in a cascade Bi2Te3/nanostructured PbTe module with eight p-n pairs.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Clinical Psychology, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d50d335f979098815b592ec8c66d4d03d981c254

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