Practical High-Performance (Bi,Sb)2Te3-Based Thermoelectric Nanocomposites Fabricated by Nanoparticle Mixing and Scrap Recycling

Bowen Cai; Hua-Lu Zhuang; Qian Cao; Haihua Hu; Jinfeng Dong; Asfandiyar; Jing-Feng Li

doi:10.1021/acsami.0c01014

Practical High-Performance (Bi,Sb)₂Te₃-Based Thermoelectric Nanocomposites Fabricated by Nanoparticle Mixing and Scrap Recycling

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 Apr 8;12(14):16426-16435. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c01014. Epub 2020 Mar 30.

Authors

Bowen Cai¹, Hua-Lu Zhuang¹, Qian Cao², Haihua Hu¹, Jinfeng Dong¹, Asfandiyar¹, Jing-Feng Li¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, 100084 Beijing, P. R. China.
² Huabei Cooling Device Co. Ltd., 065400 Hebei, P. R. China.

PMID: 32223211
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c01014

Abstract

Bi₂Te₃-based compounds are the most mature and widely used thermoelectric materials. However, industrial device fabrication will inevitably produce a lot of Bi₂Te₃ scraps, which results in wastes of expensive material resources. In this work, we recycled p-type (Bi,Sb)₂Te₃ scraps and reprocessed them by making nanocomposites with nano-SiC. The thermoelectric performance was enhanced, and a high ZT value of 1.07 was achieved, which is a significant improvement compared with commercial p-type (Bi,Sb)₂Te₃ ingots. Also, the hardness showed a notable increase, which is beneficial for device fabrication. In addition, we adjusted the proportion of Bi/Te of the commercial p-type (Bi,Sb)₂Te₃ scraps, thereby improving the thermoelectric performance and obtaining a higher ZT value of 1.2.

Keywords: bismuth telluride; commercial scraps recycle; compositional optimization; hardness; thermoelectric.