Kim, Min-Seok Lee, Woo-Jin Cho, Ki-Hyun Ahn, Jae-Pyoung Sung, Yun-Mo 2024-01-20T04:01:22Z 2024-01-20T04:01:22Z 2021-09-04 2016-07 1936-0851 https://pubs.kist.re.kr/handle/201004/123919 Dramatic enhancements in the figure of merit have been obtained in bulk thermoelectric materials by doping, band engineering, and nanostructuring. Especially, in p-type thermoelectrics, high figure of merits near 2.0 have been reported in a few papers through the reduction in lattice thermal conductivity and the advancement in power factors. However, there exists no report on the n-type systems showing high figure of merits because of their intrinsically low Seebeck coefficients. Here, we demonstrate that a nanostructured bulk n-type thermoelectric material that was assembled by sintering spinodally decomposed lead chalcogenide nanoparticles having a composition of PbSe0.5Te0.5 reaches a high figure of merit of 1.85. The spinodally decomposed nanoparticles permit our thermoelectric material to have extremely low lattice thermal conductivity and a high power factor as a result of nanostructuring, electronic optimization, insertion of an impurity phase and phase change in local areas. We propose that this interesting concept would be one of the promising approaches that overcome limitation arising from the fact that most parameters in the figure of merit are closely correlated. English AMER CHEMICAL SOC THERMAL-CONDUCTIVITY PHASE-SEPARATION FIGURE MERIT CONVERGENCE TEMPERATURE EFFICIENCY DISTORTION GROWTH ALLOY Spinodally Decomposed PbSe-PbTe Nanoparticles for High-Performance Thermoelectrics: Enhanced Phonon Scattering and Unusual Transport Behavior Article 10.1021/acsnano.6b03696 1 ACS NANO, v.10, no.7, pp.7197 - 7207 ACS NANO 10 7 7197 7207 scie scopus 000380576600087 2-s2.0-84979912957 Chemistry, Multidisciplinary Chemistry, Physical Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Materials Science, Multidisciplinary Chemistry Science & Technology - Other Topics Materials Science Article THERMAL-CONDUCTIVITY PHASE-SEPARATION FIGURE MERIT CONVERGENCE TEMPERATURE EFFICIENCY DISTORTION GROWTH ALLOY thermoelectrics spinodal decomposition nanoparticles spark plasma sintering