Oxygen vacancy plays an important role in metal oxide semiconductors to improve the photocatalytic efficiency. Herein, we developed an effective method to control the formation of oxygen vacancy in porous...
Due to its unique high conductivity and flexibility,
the two-dimensional
MXene material (Ti3C2T
x
) is expected to possess great potential in the thermoelectric
field. However, the low thermoelectric performance from high thermal
conductivity and a low Seebeck coefficient has limited its practical
application. In this report, we demonstrate the uniform growth of
ZnO layers on the laminar Ti3C2T
x
membrane by atomic layer deposition (ALD). Benefiting
from the low-temperature deposition characteristics of the ALD technique,
the ZnO@Ti3C2T
x
composite
films maintain the basic apparent morphology of the original films
after the deposition. We reveal that the Schottky barrier formed between
ZnO and Ti3C2T
x
exhibits
an energy-filtering effect, significantly enhancing the Seebeck coefficient
to result in more than a double increase in the power factor. Meanwhile,
the strong phonon-interface scattering between ZnO and Ti3C2T
x
is found to reduce the
thermal conductivity of the composite films by a factor of four as
compared to pure Ti3C2T
x
ones, further improving the overall thermoelectric properties
of the ZnO@Ti3C2T
x
composite films. Our investigation provides an ALD-based strategy
for growing wide band gap layers on the narrow band gap films to improve
the thermoelectric performance of various MXene materials.
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