Journal of Inorganic Materials ›› 2013, Vol. 28 ›› Issue (2): 224-228.DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1077.2012.12615

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Enhanced Thermoelectric Properties of BaxEuyCo4Sb12 with Very High Filling Fraction

WU Ting, BAI Sheng-Qiang, SHI Xun, CHEN Li-Dong   

  1. (CAS Key Laboratory of Energy-conversion Materials, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China)
  • Received:2012-10-17 Published:2013-02-10 Online:2013-01-23
  • About author:吴 汀. E-mail: wuting@mail.sic.ac.cn
  • Supported by:
    Foundation item: National Natural Science Foundation of China (51004096, 51102260)

Abstract:

Filled skutterudite is one of the most promising thermoelectric materials for power generation applications. We report the high-temperature thermoelectric properties including electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, and thermal conductivity in single-phased polycrystalline dual-element-filled skutterudites BaxEuyCo4Sb12(0<x<0.2, 0<y<0.3). The double-filled skutterudites are synthesized by the melting-quenching-annealing method and the bulk pellects are sintered by spark plasma sintering (SPS). High total filling fractions (x+y>40%) with very large power factor of BaxEuyCo4Sb12 over 60 μW/(cm•K2) at high temperature is obtained. The combination of Ba and Eu fillers inside the voids of the skutterudite structure provides a broad range of resonant phonon scattering and consequently a strong suppression in the lattice thermal conductivity is observed. The lattice thermal conductivity values for BaxEuyCo4Sb12 system are dramatically decreased and the lowest value is about 1.7 W/(m•K) at room temperature. Consequently, enhanced thermoelectric figure of merits (ZT) for Ba and Eu dual-element-filled CoSb3 skutterudites are obtained at elevated temperatures, in particular ZT=1.3 at 850 K for Ba0.19Eu0.23Co4Sb12.

Key words: thermoelectric, filled-skutterudite, transport properties

CLC Number: