Nanoengineering Approach toward High Power Factor Ag2Se/Se Composite Films for Flexible Thermoelectric Generators

Ying Liu; Yating Li; Miaomiao Wu; Yiming Lu; Zixing Wang; Ping Wei; Wenyu Zhao; Kefeng Cai

doi:10.1021/acsami.3c06960

Nanoengineering Approach toward High Power Factor Ag₂Se/Se Composite Films for Flexible Thermoelectric Generators

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2023 Aug 2;15(30):36587-36593. doi: 10.1021/acsami.3c06960. Epub 2023 Jul 20.

Authors

Ying Liu^{1

2

3}, Yating Li¹, Miaomiao Wu¹, Yiming Lu¹, Zixing Wang¹, Ping Wei⁴, Wenyu Zhao⁴, Kefeng Cai¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Development and Application for Metal-Functional Materials, School of Materials Science & Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804, China.
² CAS Key Laboratory of Materials for Energy Conversion, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China.
³ University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China.

PMID: 37470451
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.3c06960

Abstract

Herein, a flexible Ag₂Se/Se composite film with a high power factor has been fabricated on a nylon membrane. The film has a high density and contains well-crystallized Ag₂Se grains and embedded Se nanoinclusions, which exhibits not only excellent flexibility but also a comparably large room-temperature power factor and Seebeck coefficient of up to 2023 μW m^-1 K^-2 and -155 μV K^-1, respectively. The high Seebeck coefficient is ascribed to the energy-filtering effect as caused by the Se/Ag₂Se heterointerface. The assembled flexible thermoelectric generator (4-leg) exhibits a maximum output power of 1135 nW and a power density of up to 16.4 W m^-2 when the applied temperature difference is 30 K. This work offers a feasible method to design high-performance and low-cost flexible thermoelectric generators used for wearable electronics.

Keywords: Ag2Se; film; flexible device; nanoinclusions; thermoelectric.