Enhanced Thermoelectricity in High-Temperature β-Phase Copper(I) Selenides Embedded with Cu2Te Nanoclusters

Sajid Butt; Wei Xu; Muhammad U Farooq; Guang K Ren; Qinghua Zhang; Yingcai Zhu; Sajid U Khan; Lijuan Liu; Meijuan Yu; Fida Mohmed; Yuanhua Lin; Ce-Wen Nan

doi:10.1021/acsami.6b02086

Enhanced Thermoelectricity in High-Temperature β-Phase Copper(I) Selenides Embedded with Cu2Te Nanoclusters

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2016 Jun 22;8(24):15196-204. doi: 10.1021/acsami.6b02086. Epub 2016 Jun 7.

Authors

Sajid Butt^{1

2}, Wei Xu^{3

4}, Muhammad U Farooq⁵, Guang K Ren¹, Qinghua Zhang¹, Yingcai Zhu³, Sajid U Khan², Lijuan Liu⁶, Meijuan Yu³, Fida Mohmed¹, Yuanhua Lin¹, Ce-Wen Nan¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University , Beijing 100084, People's Republic of China.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Space Technology , Islamabad 44000, Pakistan.
³ Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Beijing 100049, P.R. China.
⁴ RICMASS, Rome International Center for Materials Science Superstripes, Via dei Sabelli 119A, 00185 Rome, Italy.
⁵ School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing , Beijing 100083, People's Republic of China.
⁶ Department of Physics, Zhengzhou University , No. 100 Science Avenue, Zhengzhou, Henan 450001, P.R. China.

PMID: 27135808
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b02086

Abstract

We report remarkably enhanced thermoelectric performance of Te doped Cu2Se in midtemperature range. Through ball-milling process followed by spark plasma sintering (SPS), nanoscale Cu2Te clusters were embeded in the matrix of Cu2Se, inducing a drastic enhancement of thermoelectric performance by reducing the thermal conductivity without degrading the power factor. A large ZT value of 1.9 was achieved at 873 K for Cu2Se1.9Te0.1, which is about 2 times larger than that of the pure Cu2Se. The nanoscale heat management by Cu2Te nanoclusters in superionic conductors opens up an avenue for thermoelectric materials research.

Keywords: Cu2Se; Cu2Te nanoclusters; ZT; nanoscale heat management; superionic conductors.