Development of bulk-nanostructuring methods for BiSbTe thermoelectrics

摘要

Devices based upon the thermoelectric effect are sought after as a technology with the potential of miniaturizing power generation equipment and heat pumps. By the dawn of the 21th century and the advent of nanoengineering, these materials have gotten an upswing in attention from the scientific community with the methods and instruments that now are available to improve the materials figure of merit. In this paper three methods were investigated from their performance enhancing effects on BiSbTe: powder purification, mixed grains and electron filtering. By varying the parameters of each method, a performance improvement of 17% in respect to figure of merit was achieved by electron filtering.