Study of heat treatment temperature on the thermoelectric properties of cold-sintered SnSe

doi:10.19799/j.cnki.2095-4239.2024.0501

Abstract

Abstract:

SnSe thermoelectric materials have the advantages of low thermal conductivity, low cost, and environmental friendliness, which makes them one of the hot materials for research in the field of thermoelectricity. In this paper, polycrystalline SnSe blocks were prepared using hydrothermal method and cold sintering process, and then heat-treated. The influence of heat treatment temperature on the thermoelectric properties of the synthesised polycrystalline SnSe was investigated. XRD results showed that the main diffraction peaks of each sample matched with the SnSe card. SEM results showed that the particles changed from bulk to lamellar structure and the internal voids of the material decreased with the increase of annealing temperature. Positron annihilation measurements show that various vacancy-type defects, such as V_Se, V_Sn, V_SnSe and large vacancy clusters, may exist in the cold-sintered SnSe samples, and these vacancy-type defects are effective phonon scattering centres, leading to a decrease in the thermal conductivity of the lattice, and as the annealing temperature increases, the decrease in voids and the gradual restoration of vacancy-type defects lead to a decrease in the potential barrier at the grain boundaries, resulting in a gradual increase in the electrical conductivity. The trends of conductivity, power factor and dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) are almost the same, and all of them increase with the increase of annealing temperature. At the test temperature of 773 K, the conductivity σ of the 500 ℃ annealed sample is as high as 4.1 × 10³ S/m, and the power factor is 3.71 μW/(cm•K²); whereas the thermal conductivity increases slightly with the increase of the annealing temperature which lowers the phonon scattering centre. Finally, the ZT of the annealed sample at 500 °C was calculated to be 0.7, which is 35.7% higher than the ZT value of the unannealed sample. Thus, it shows that the cold sintering process and heat treatment have great potential in the study of SnSe materials, and lays a theoretical basis for the preparation of high-performance thermoelectric materials.

Key words: SnSe, Cold sintering, Heat treatment, Power factor, thermoelectric merit value, Positron annihilation

CLC Number:

TB34

Jun Ding, Lijie Shi, Xiangbin Chen, Xiang Qu, Zhe Cheng, Xiufen Li, Man Jiang, Zhiquan Chen, Hongyu Wang. Study of heat treatment temperature on the thermoelectric properties of cold-sintered SnSe[J]. Energy Storage Science and Technology, doi: 10.19799/j.cnki.2095-4239.2024.0501.

Figures/Tables 8

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