Investigation of the thermoelectric behavior and structure formation of (lead telluride/silver antimony telluride)-silver chalcogenide mixtures

Sustainable energy research is currently on the forefront of scientific exploration and energy conservation and the development of new energy production techniques are both crucial for our long lasting stable future. Accordingly, thermoelectric materials will be a significant energy conservation and production source. The state-of --the-art thermoelectric materials can be used to collect the wasted heat and converted to power, which is the future for the green power generation.;PbTe is considered a state-of-the-art thermoelectric material, which has been extensively studied. It forms in the NaCl structure and it is a semiconductor with a room temperature gap value of 0.29 eV. Ag and Se was chosen to dope into the PbTe system to form (PbTe)(AgxSe). The hope was that the presence of nano-scale inhomogeneities would lead to a significant reduction in the thermal conductivity and a significant improvement of the thermoelectric Figure-of-merit with respect to the stoichiometric PbTe. With the result of PbTe (AgxSe), the similar system CuxAg3-xSbSeTe 2 alloy were doped to further reduce the thermal conductivity and improve the Figure-of-merit ZT.