Friday, December 19, 2014

Thermal conductivity of ordered-disordered material: a case study of superionic Ag 2 Te

Thermoelectric devices, which can generate electricity from waste heat, offer an attractive pathway for addressing an important niche in the globally growing landscape of energy demand. In the past few decades, the search for high-efficiency thermoelectrics has been guided by the concept of ‘phonon-glass electron-crystal’ (PGEC), i.e. an ideal thermoelectric material should have high carrier mobility and low thermal conductivity. Although remarkable progress has already been made along this line, the efficiency of thermoelectrics is still too poor to compete with other electricity producing methods. Ordered-disordered material, an emerging trend of high performance thermoelectrics under the concept of PGEC, is a new hot topic in the current thermoelectric research community. Taking superionic phase silver telluride ( α -Ag 2 Te) as an example, we performed a comprehensive study of the thermal transport properties and of its physical mechanism by means of equilibrium...

Tao Ouyang, Xiaoliang Zhang and Ming Hu

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