Abstract
Thermoelectric materials promise to create additional efficiencies in energy management by harvesting the energy of waste heat and converting it to electricity. We introduce 2D Sb2Si2Te6 as a promising new high-performance thermoelectric material. Sb2Si2Te6 exhibits an intrinsically high thermoelectric figure of merit ZT value of ∼1.08 at 823 K. We then devise a unique cellular nanostructure by a post-synthetic reaction strategy that forms in situ Si2Te3 nanosheets, which serve as an effective barrier to heat propagation, yielding an ∼40% reduction in the already very low lattice thermal conductivity to ∼0.29 Wm−1K−1 at 823 K. The cellular nanostructure enables a very high ZT value of ∼1.65 at 823 K for this new material and a high average ZT value of 0.98 (400–823 K). We describe the novel cellular nanostructure design and a single-step chemical route to achieve it, highlighting a potentially new and effective general design strategy for achieving high thermoelectric performance.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 159-175 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Joule |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 15 Jan 2020 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019
Keywords
- SbSiTe
- Seebeck coefficient
- SiTe
- cellular nanostructure
- core-shell
- minority blocking
- narrow gap semiconductors
- thermoelectric
- waste heat recovery