Thermoelectric Flexible Silver Selenide Films: Compositional and Length Optimization

Jie Gao; Lei Miao; Huajun Lai; Sijing Zhu; Ying Peng; Xiaoyang Wang; Kunihito Koumoto; Huanfu Cai

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2019.100753

Thermoelectric Flexible Silver Selenide Films: Compositional and Length Optimization

iScience. 2020 Jan 24;23(1):100753. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2019.100753. Epub 2019 Nov 30.

Authors

Jie Gao¹, Lei Miao², Huajun Lai¹, Sijing Zhu¹, Ying Peng³, Xiaoyang Wang⁴, Kunihito Koumoto⁵, Huanfu Cai⁶

Affiliations

¹ Guangxi Key Laboratory of Information Material, Guangxi Collaborative Innovation Center of Structure and Property for New Energy and Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China.
² Guangxi Key Laboratory of Information Material, Guangxi Collaborative Innovation Center of Structure and Property for New Energy and Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China. Electronic address: miaolei@guet.edu.cn.
³ Guangxi Key Laboratory of Information Material, Guangxi Collaborative Innovation Center of Structure and Property for New Energy and Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China; Department of Materials Physics, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan.
⁴ Guangxi Key Laboratory of Information Material, Guangxi Collaborative Innovation Center of Structure and Property for New Energy and Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China; Department of Chemical Systems Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan.
⁵ Nagoya Industrial Science Research Institute, Nagoya 464-0819, Japan; Center of Nanotechnology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia.
⁶ School of Internet Finance and Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou 510520, China.

Abstract

Silver selenide is considered as a promising room temperature thermoelectric material due to its excellent performance and high abundance. However, the silver selenide-based flexible film is still behind in thermoelectric performance compared with its bulk counterpart. In this work, the composition of paper-supported silver selenide film was successfully modulated through changing reactant ratio and annealing treatment. In consequence, the power factor value of 2450.9 ± 364.4 μW/(mK²) at 303 K, which is close to that of state-of-the-art bulk Ag₂Se has been achieved. Moreover, a thermoelectric device was fabricated after optimizing the length of annealed silver selenide film via numerical simulation. At temperature difference of 25 K, the maximum power density of this device reaches 5.80 W/m², which is superior to that of previous film thermoelectric devices. Theoretically and experimentally, this work provides an effective way to achieve silver-selenide-based flexible thermoelectric film and device with high performance.

Keywords: Electrochemical Materials Science; Energy Materials; Materials Synthesis.