Ultra-Fast Synthesis for Ag2Se and CuAgSe Thermoelectric Materials

Ag2Se and CuAgSe have been recently reported as promising thermoelectric materials at room temperature. The traditional melting-annealing-sintering processes are used to grow Ag2Se and CuAgSe materials with the disadvantages of high costs of energy and time. In this work, phase-pure polycrystalline Ag2Se and CuAgSe compounds were synthesized from raw elemental powders directly by manual mixing followed by spark plasma sintering (MM-SPS) in a few minutes. The influence of SPS heating rate on the phase composition, microstructure, and thermoelectric properties, including Seebeck coefficient, electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity, were investigated. The zTs of 0.8 at 390 K and 0.6 at 450 K are obtained for Ag2Se and CuAgSe, respectively, which is comparable with the values in the materials prepared by the traditional method. Furthermore, this ultrafast sample synthesis can significantly save material synthesis time and thus has the obvious advantage for large-scale production.