Influence of gallium doping on structural and thermoelectric properties of bismuth telluride

Enhancement in thermoelectric performance of hydrothermally synthesized Ca and Sb co-doped Bi2Te3 nanostructures

“…Benefitting from the increasing electrical conductivity and reduced thermal conductivity, the total ZT was improved. The ZT decreased with an increase in temperature due to the bipolar thermal conduction [20]. Table 3 shows the comparison of thermoelectric properties of earlier reported Bi 2 Te 3 based materials with the present work.…”

“…Cu intercalation in n-type Bi 2 (Te, Se) 3 alloys have been discovered to be a particularly efficient method for lowering the lattice thermal conductivity by adding more point defect scattering centers. The quantum confinement effect and lower k tot of low-dimensional materials compared to bulk materials with better thermoelectric efficiency at an absolute temperature have reignited interest in TE materials [14,[19][20][21]. Several dopants like Se, Sb, Cu, Mg, Cl, Ti, Ca, Pd, S, In, etc have been used for improving the thermoelectric efficiency [22][23][24][25][26][27].…”

“…to the various structural dislocations and the creation of point defects with doping. These dislocations act as an effective scattering center for reducing k tot at atomic and micro scales [20]. Also, the prepared samples are nanostructured which contributes to phonon scattering at grain boundaries and then decreases the k tot .…”

“…The k tot can be written as the sum of lattice thermal conductivity (k lat ) and electronic thermal conductivity (k e ). The electronic thermal conductivity was calculated by Widemann Franz law given below [20,48];…”