Improved Thermoelectric Properties of Re-Substituted Higher Manganese Silicides by Inducing Phonon Scattering and an Energy-Filtering Effect at Grain Boundary Interfaces

Abstract

In this study, the effect of the grain boundary density on the transport properties of the Re-substituted higher manganese silicide Mn_30.4Re₆Si_63.6 has been investigated. The efficiency of electrical energy conversion from waste heat, mainly in thermoelectric generators, depends on how the thermal conduction is reduced, while the charge-carrier electrons/holes contribute to possess a large magnitude of both the electrical conductivity σ and Seebeck coefficient <i>S</i>. In this work, we tried to obtain such a condition with a novel approach of merging the energy-filtering effect at the grain boundaries to improve the power factor (PF) = <i>S</i>²σ. The nanostructuring and heavy-element substitution were also employed to greatly scatter the phonon conduction. As a result, enhancement of the PF was observed in the diffused nanostructure of annealed ribbon samples, and the enhancement was correlated with the formation of Schottky barriers at the grain boundary interface. Together with a reduction of the thermal conductivity to very low magnitude 1.27 W m^-1 K^-1, we obtained a maximum <i>ZT</i> = 1.15 at 873 K for the annealed ribbon samples.