Realizing p-type NbCoSn half-Heusler compounds with enhanced thermoelectric performance via Sc substitution

Ruijuan Yan; Wenjie Xie; Benjamin Balke; Guoxing Chen; Anke Weidenkaff

doi:10.1080/14686996.2020.1726715

Realizing p-type NbCoSn half-Heusler compounds with enhanced thermoelectric performance via Sc substitution

Sci Technol Adv Mater. 2020 Feb 7;21(1):122-130. doi: 10.1080/14686996.2020.1726715. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Ruijuan Yan¹, Wenjie Xie¹, Benjamin Balke², Guoxing Chen¹, Anke Weidenkaff^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany.
² Fraunhofer Research Institution for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS, Alzenau, Germany.

Abstract

N-type half-Heusler NbCoSn is a promising thermoelectric material due to favourable electronic properties. It has attracted much attention for thermoelectric applications while the desired p-type NbCoSn counterpart shows poor thermoelectric performance. In this work, p-type NbCoSn has been obtained using Sc substitution at the Nb site, and their thermoelectric properties were investigated. Of all samples, Nb_0.95Sc_0.05CoSn compound shows a maximum power factor of 0.54 mW/mK² which is the highest among the previously reported values of p-type NbCoSn. With the suppression of thermal conductivity, p-type Nb_0.95Sc_0.05CoSn compound shows the highest measured figure of merit ZT = 0.13 at 879 K.

Keywords: 206 Energy conversion; 210 Thermoelectronics; P-type NbCoSn; Thermal transport; half-Heusler compound; insulators; recovery; storage; thermoelectric materials; transport.