Thermoelectric property studies on carbon-60 doped P-type Bismuth(0.5)Antimony(1.5)Tellurium(3)

Solid state cooling and power generation based on thermoelectric principles are regarded as one of the technologies with the potential of solving the current energy crisis. Thermoelectric devices could be widely used in waste heat recovery, small scale power generation and refrigeration. It has no moving parts and is environmental friendly. The limitation to its application is due to its low efficiency. Most of the current commercialized thermoelectric materials have a figure of merit (ZT) around 1. The performance of these materials depends on the dimensionless figure-of-merit ZT (= S2sigma T/ kappa), where S is the Seebeck coefficient; sigma is the electrical conductivity; kappa is the thermal conductivity; S2sigma is the power factor and T is the absolute temperature. In recent years, many studies have shown a significant enhancement of figure of merit by utilizing a nanostructuring approach to reduce the thermal conductivity by scattering ph onons more effectively than electrons.;The research shows how using a low-cost and mass-production ball milling and hot press compaction nanocomposite process, can improve the power factor by 50% using a temperature range of 60 °C to 80 °C in p-type nanostructured Bi.5Sb1.5Te3 bulk alloys. Further research was developed by using the aforementioned novel approach for cost and time effectiveness by doping C60 to nanocomposite Bi.5Sb1.5Te 3 alloy to improve the figure of merit of thermoelectric materials. The improvement is mainly because of fullerene molecules that provide thermal phonon blocking and particular charge transfer in the nanocomposite. The molecules act as electron traps, and thus decrease the density of free electrons in n-type semiconductors and generate holes in p-type materials. These high performance materials have been investigated to get high efficiency from thermoelectric devices for waste heat recovery, power generation, and cooling applications.