Abstract
Thermoelectric technology, harvesting electric power directly from heat, is a promising environmentally friendly means of energy savings and power generation. The thermoelectric efficiency is determined by the device dimensionless figure of merit ZTdev, and optimizing this efficiency requires maximizing ZT values over a broad temperature range. Here, we report a record high ZTdev ∼1.34, with ZT ranging from 0.7 to 2.0 at 300 to 773 kelvin, realized in hole-doped tin selenide (SnSe) crystals. The exceptional performance arises from the ultrahigh power factor, which comes from a high electrical conductivity and a strongly enhanced Seebeck coefficient enabled by the contribution of multiple electronic valence bands present in SnSe. SnSe is a robust thermoelectric candidate for energy conversion applications in the low and moderate temperature range.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 141-144 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | Science |
Volume | 351 |
Issue number | 6269 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 8 2016 |
Funding
This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under award DE-SC0014520 (G.T., H.C., V.P.D., S.H., C.W., and M.G.K.); and S3TEC-EFRC grant DE-SC0001299 (G.J.S.). This work was also supported by the "Zhuoyue" Program from Beihang University and the Recruitment Program for Young Professionals and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 51571007 (L.-D.Z., Y.P., S.G., and H.X.). and by the Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality under grant no. ZDSYS20141118160434515 and Guangdong Science and Technology Fund under grant no. 2015A030308001 (J.H.). The synthesis, characterization, transport measurements, and DFT calculations were supported by DE-SC0014520. The validation measurements were supported by DE-SC0001299. Measurements at University of Michigan (C.U.) were supported by Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) grant DE-SC0001054. All data in the main text and the supplementary materials are available online at www.sciencemag.org.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General