TY - JOUR
T1 - High-Performance PbTe Thermoelectric Films by Scalable and Low-Cost Printing
AU - Han, Chao
AU - Tan, Gangjian
AU - Varghese, Tony
AU - Kanatzidis, Mercouri G.
AU - Zhang, Yanliang
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy, under Award Number DE-NE0008255 (screen printing and characterization). At Northwestern University (G.T. and M.G.K.), the work was supported by DARPA Grant HR0011-16-C-0035.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 American Chemical Society.
PY - 2018/4/13
Y1 - 2018/4/13
N2 - Thermoelectric (TE) technology has a significant impact on low-grade waste heat recovery, increasing the efficiency of energy usage and reducing carbon emissions. Two of the big obstacles for wide application of this technology, however, are the high fabrication cost and low efficiency of thermoelectric modules. By employing Pb0.98Na0.02Te-4 mol % SrTe powder, which is one group of superior thermoelectric materials, this work explores the possibility of making PbTe-SrTe-based thermoelectric films via a scalable, low-cost screen printing method and investigates ways of further enhancing their performance. Addition of tellurium powder can significantly increase the thermoelectric performance of the printed PbTe-SrTe films through doping and enhancement of interparticle connection. The conservative estimate of thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, is above 1.0 at 350 °C for PbTe-SrTe 2 wt % Te sample, which is among the highest for printed thermoelectric films. This opens up a new, low-cost direction for manufacturing high-performance thermoelectric devices.
AB - Thermoelectric (TE) technology has a significant impact on low-grade waste heat recovery, increasing the efficiency of energy usage and reducing carbon emissions. Two of the big obstacles for wide application of this technology, however, are the high fabrication cost and low efficiency of thermoelectric modules. By employing Pb0.98Na0.02Te-4 mol % SrTe powder, which is one group of superior thermoelectric materials, this work explores the possibility of making PbTe-SrTe-based thermoelectric films via a scalable, low-cost screen printing method and investigates ways of further enhancing their performance. Addition of tellurium powder can significantly increase the thermoelectric performance of the printed PbTe-SrTe films through doping and enhancement of interparticle connection. The conservative estimate of thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, is above 1.0 at 350 °C for PbTe-SrTe 2 wt % Te sample, which is among the highest for printed thermoelectric films. This opens up a new, low-cost direction for manufacturing high-performance thermoelectric devices.
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U2 - 10.1021/acsenergylett.8b00041
DO - 10.1021/acsenergylett.8b00041
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85045344433
SN - 2380-8195
VL - 3
SP - 818
EP - 822
JO - ACS Energy Letters
JF - ACS Energy Letters
IS - 4
ER -
