Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 5, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5515
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Funding
- South University of Science and Technology of China from Shenzhen government and national 1000 plan for young scientists
- Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China [2013M540037]
- Revolutionary Materials for Solid-State Energy Conversion, an Energy Frontier Research Center - US Department of Energy, Office of Science, and Office of Basic Energy Sciences [DE-SC0001054]
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Thermoelectrics interconvert heat to electricity and are of great interest in waste heat recovery, solid-state cooling and so on. The efficiency of thermoelectric materials depends directly on the average ZT (dimensionless figure of merit) over a certain temperature range, which historically has been challenging to increase. Here we report that 2.5% K-doped PbTe0.7S0.3 achieves a ZT of > 2 for a very wide temperature range from 673 to 923 K and has a record high average ZT of 1.56 (corresponding to a theoretical energy conversion efficiency of similar to 20.7% at the temperature gradient from 300 to 900 K). The PbTe0.7S0.3 composition shows spinodal decomposition with large PbTe-rich and PbS-rich regions where each region exhibits dissimilar types of nanostructures. Such high average ZT is obtained by synergistically optimized electrical- and thermal-transport properties via carrier concentration tuning, band structure engineering and hierarchical architecturing, and highlights a realistic prospect of wide applications of thermoelectrics.
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