Facile synthesis and high thermoelectric performance of tellurium with antimony doping

Besides high thermoelectric (TE) performance, simple chemical compositions and facile synthesis methods are attractive for practical fabrication and applications of TE materials due to their effective rates of synthesis and higher stabilities. Element semiconductor Tellurium (Te) is one potential middle temperature TE material and has attracted wide interest in material science. In this study, we report that a high ther-moelectric performance ZT similar to 0.88@600 K for polycrystalline Te with slight Antimony (Sb) doping was facile synthesized by one-step high pressure technique. Our experimental results reveal that the carrier concentration of high pressure synthesized Te is more sensitive to dopants compared with the samples obtained by the conventional preparation method. We observed large amount of nanograins, second nanophase and crystal defects in the high pressure synthetic samples, which can significantly weaken the phonon thermal conductivity, leading to a high TE performance in Te samples. This work indicates that high pressure method provides an alternative direction for designing TE materials with simple composition. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study successfully synthesized tellurium materials with high thermoelectric performance using a one-step high pressure technique, demonstrating the potential application of high pressure synthesis method in designing thermoelectric materials with simple compositions.