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Grain Boundary Engineering for Thermal Conductivity Reduction in Bulk Nanostructured Thermoelectric Materials

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Abstract

Bulk thermoelectric (TE) materials have recently seen significant enhancement in the measured dimensionless figure of merit ZT by nanostructuring the constituent materials. This is usually attributed to phonon scattering at grain boundaries, with increased grain boundary density leading to significant suppression of phonon propagation from one grain to the next while maintaining electron transport. However, to date, the reduction in thermal conductivity has been observed solely at the bulk scale. Controlling and understanding morphology and size distribution of the nanostructured grains remain a challenge. There is general lack of experimental validation of local effects of grain boundary scattering at micro- and nanoscale. This chapter discusses two strategies by which we may tune the grain size and quality of the local domains of Bi2Te3-based materials: shockwave consolidation and AC electric field-assisted sintering technology (FAST) via Gleeble system. These two strategies give a wide range of mean grain boundary size, from less than 100 nm to more than 500 nm. We use a multi-scale approach to measure the thermal conductivity of these samples on macroscopic/bulk scale and mesoscopic/deep submicron scale. To determine thermal conductivity over this wide dimensional scale, we leverage the ultrahigh-resolution capabilities offered by scanning thermal microscopy, the microscale capabilities of frequency-domain thermoreflectance, and the bulk-scale one-dimensional (1D) steady-state method. Despite local variations, the values on average agree well with one another, and added local thermal resolution may offer insight to future efforts to better tune materials for optimal TE performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA

    Adam A. Wilson, Patrick J. Taylor & Shashi P. Karna

  2. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Oak Ridge, TN, USA

    Daniel S. Choi

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  1. Adam A. Wilson
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  2. Patrick J. Taylor
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  3. Daniel S. Choi
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  4. Shashi P. Karna
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Correspondence to Adam A. Wilson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. RusTec LLC, Moscow, Russia

    Sergey Skipidarov

  2. RusTec LLC, Moscow, Russia

    Mikhail Nikitin

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Wilson, A.A., Taylor, P.J., Choi, D.S., Karna, S.P. (2019). Grain Boundary Engineering for Thermal Conductivity Reduction in Bulk Nanostructured Thermoelectric Materials. In: Skipidarov, S., Nikitin, M. (eds) Novel Thermoelectric Materials and Device Design Concepts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12057-3_12

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