Despite recent advances, thermoelectric energy conversion will never be as efficient as steam engines. That means thermoelectrics will remain limited to applications served poorly or not at all by existing technology. Bad news for thermoelectricians, but the climate crisis requires that we face bad news head on.

The thermoelectric properties of 28 sintered Si0.8 Ge0.2 alloys, heavily doped with either boron or phosphorus and prepared from powders with median particle sizes ranging from about 1 μm to over 100 μm, have been determined from 300 to 1300 K. The thermal conductivity decreases with decreasing particle size, however, the figure of merit is not significantly increased due to a compensating reduction in the electrical conductivity. The thermoelectric figure of merit is in good agreement with results of Dismukes et al. [J. Appl. Phys. 10, 2899 (1964)] on similarly doped alloys prepared by zone-leveling techniques. The electrical and thermal conductivity are found to be sensitive to preparation procedure while the Seebeck coefficient and figure of merit are much less sensitive. The high-temperature electrical properties are consistent with charge carrier scattering by acoustic or optical phonons.

A model is presented for the high-temperature transport properties of large-grain-size, heavily doped n-type silicon-germanium alloys. Electron and phonon transport coefficients are calculated using standard Boltzmann equation expressions in the relaxation time approximation. Good agreement with experiment is found by considering acoustic phonon and ionized impurity scattering for electrons, and phonon-phonon, point defect, and electron-phonon scattering for phonons. The parameters describing electron transport in heavily doped and lightly doped materials are significantly different and suggest that most carriers in heavily doped materials are in a band formed largely from impurity states. The maximum dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit for single-crystal, n-type Si0.8Ge0.2 at 1300 K is estimated at ZT≂1.13 with an optimum carrier concentration of n≂2.9×1020 cm−3.

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