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Journal of Electronic Materials, 2013, Volume 42, Issue 7, pp 1463-1468.
Guanghe Li, Ken Kurosaki, Yuji Ohishi, Hiroaki Muta, Shinsuke Yamanaka.
Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Suita, 565-0871, Japan and
Research Institute of Nuclear Engineering, University of Fukui, Fukui, 910-8507, Japan
Abstract
Recent two decades, thermoelectric (TE) technology has attracted much interest due to the direct energy conversion from waste heat to electrical power, and could be an important part of the solution to future power supply and sustainable energy management. However, the low efficiency of TE materials for energy conversion is the main obstacle for widespread application in industry such as the exhaust heat recovery in automobiles. The efficiency of TE materials is governed by the dimensionless figure of merit ZT(= S2 {delta}T/k),which is still limited to about 1 or less, corresponding to the device efficiency of several percent. Therefore, the key and main goal in TE material research is to improve ZT through minimizing the lattice thermal conductivity(klat) while maintaining high electrical properties (S and Delta). After the introduction of PGEC (phonon-glass-electron-crystal) concept, filled skutteruditeshave been attracted much attention as one of the promising bulk TE materials for many intermediate temperature applications. In the present work, we report skutterudites filled by In: InxCo4Sb12in which a dramatic reduction of klat was achieved, resulted in an enhanced ZT = 0.67 at 600 K. The remarkable reduction of klat was mainly due to theeffective phonon scattering both by rattling effect of Inin the voids of CoSb3 crystal and by the InSb impurities existed in the skutteruditematrix phase.
