High-performance thermoelectric all-carbon heterostructures are investigated. The carbon nanoparticle barrier between carbon nanotubes can enhance the thermoelectric performance due to the energy filtering effect.
In the past decade, the development of high-performance p-type flexible organic-inorganic thermoelectric composites based on nanocarbons (e.g. carbon nanotubes and graphene) has achieved unprecedented success, but the progress in n-type...
Abstract
Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) and Bi2Te3 nanoplates are very promising thermoelectric materials for energy harvesting. When these two materials are combined, the resulting nanocomposites exhibit high thermoelectric performance and excellent flexibility. However, simple mixing of these materials is not effective in realizing high performance. Therefore, we fabricated integrated nanocomposites by adding SWCNTs during solvothermal synthesis for the crystallization of Bi2Te3 nanoplates and prepared flexible integrated nanocomposite films by drop-casting. The integrated nanocomposite films exhibited high electrical conductivity and an n-type Seebeck coefficient owing to the low contact resistance between the nanoplates and SWCNTs. The maximum power factor was 1.38 μW/(cm K2), which was 23 times higher than that of a simple nanocomposite film formed by mixing SWCNTs during drop-casting, but excluding solvothermal synthesis. Moreover, the integrated nanocomposite films maintained their thermoelectric properties through 500 bending cycles.
The 1% rGO/Bi2Te3 composite-based flexible six-element planar thermoelectric generator devices possess both high power output and significant flexibility, which will greatly promote the application of functional inorganic materials into flexible electronics.
Flexible thermoelectric films formed using integrated nanocomposites with single-wall carbon nanotubes and Bi2Te3 nanoplates via solvothermal synthesis