First principles study of ternary skutterudites

As the demand of sustainable energy technologies increases in recent years, thermoelectric materials can potentially become a solution by increasing energy efficiency in certain systems, such as waste heat recovery system. Skutterudites is a popular group of thermoelectric materials because they show low thermal conductivity with filled voids in their structures. To investigate the potential of ternary skutterudites as thermoelectric materials, first-principles calculations are performed on filled and unfilled CoSn1.S1.S5, CoSn1.5Se1.5, CoSn1.5Te1.5, CoGe1.5S1.5, CoGe1.5Se1.5, and CoGe1.5Te1.5. Alkaline-earth metal and Lanthanum are used as void fillers in this study. Transport properties, including Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity, are obtained from Boltzmann transport theory. The calculation results show high Seebeck coefficients and low electrical conductivities. Future work will focus on increasing the electrical conductivity while reducing the thermal conductivity with appropriate filling.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Li, An, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gang Chen and Boris Kozinsky.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77074

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/77074