As a cheap substitute for PbTe or PbSe, the thermoelectric performance of PbS still remains to be improved. In this report, we selected BiS as a donor and employed a facile route of hydrothermal synthesis combined with microwave sintering to fabricate BiS doped PbS. Due to the increased electrical conductivity by BiS doping and the decreased thermal conductivity from the refined microstructure, the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT of microwave sintered PbBiS and PbBiS reached 0.90 and 0.86 at 800 K, respectively, without sign of saturation. When processed with plasma activated sintering (PAS), the highest ZT value of PbBiS only reached 0.3 at 800 K. The obtained results indicate that hydrothermal synthesis and microwave sintering can essentially improve the thermoelectric properties of PbBiS and easily realize mass production at low cost.

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A peakZTvalue of 0.66 at 675 K is reached for Bi2S3added with 1.0 mol% ZnO.

A waveguide coupled surface plasmon sensor for detection of liquid with high refractive index (RI) is designed based on polymer materials. The effects of variation of the thickness of the Au film, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) buffer, and waveguide layer on the sensing performance of the waveguide are comprehensively investigated by using the finite difference method. Numerical simulations show that a thinner gold film gives rise to a more sensitive structure, while the variation of the thickness of the PMMA buffer and waveguide layer has a little effect on the sensitivity. For liquid with high RI, the sensitivity of the sensor increases significantly. When RI of liquid to be measured increases from 1.45 to 1.52, the sensitivity is as high as 4518.14nm/RIU, and a high figure of merit of 114.07 is obtained. The waveguide coupled surface plasmon RI sensor shows potential applications in the fields of environment, industry, and agriculture sensing with the merits of compact size, low cost, and high integration density.

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