n-type carbon nanotubes/silver telluride nanohybrid buckypaper with a high-thermoelectric figure of merit

Abstract

N-type thermoelectric materials was made from CNT buckypapers. We used Ag2Te to achieve electron injection to the CNTs. The thermoelectric characterizations on more than 50 samples show that the CNTs/Ag2Te hybrids exhibit negative Seebeck coefficients (e.g. n-type) of -30 to -228 μV/K. Meanwhile, the tunneling coupling between the CNTs and Ag2Te increase the electrical conductance to the range of 10000 ~ 20000 S/m, which is higher than each single component (CNTs or Ag2Te). These n-type TE buckypapers are flexible and robust with ZT values 1~2 orders of magnitude higher than previously reproted for CNTs based TE materials. In addition, the preparation of such buckypapers are very simple as compared to tranditonal inorganic process without need for hot pressing or spark sintering. These n-type TE buckpapers can provide important 2 components for fabricating CNT based flexible TE devices with good conversion efficiency.