Thermoelectric Properties of Phase Separated Composite of Ln-Doped SrTiO₃ and TiO₂ Micro Crystals

Abstract

It seems that no satisfactory TE property has been found in n-type oxide bulk materials even though Al-doped ZnO and La-doped SrTiO₃ have high thermoelectric (TE) responses. Difficulty in developing high-performance TE materials seems to lie in finding low thermal conductivity in such oxides. The purpose of this study is to find a possibility to make an n-type TE oxide bulk material having low thermal conductivity and excellent TE properties as well. For this purpose, we fabricated and examined a series of composites constructed of TiO2 and Ln-doped SrTiO₃ fine crystals. The composites were prepared via two processing steps: (1) precursor oxide preparation by wet processes; (2) sintering by using spark plasma sintering (SPS) apparatus. The microscopic structure was examined by using scanning electron microscope (SEM; HITACHI S-4500 model) attached with an energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy. The electrical conductivities and the Seebeck coefficients were measured simultaneously using an ULVAC ZEM-1 instrument in helium atmosphere. The thermal diffusivities were measured by a laser flash method in vacuum. The composites obtained here were found to commonly have a mosaic type texture constructed of TiO₂ and SrTiO₃ fine particles with a typical size of 500 nm. The thermal conductivity values measured for three samples with different contents are ranged between 3 and 4 Wm-1K-1 in the temperature range from room temperature to 800 C. The values are apparently lower than the value for single crystal SrTiO3 samples presented in literature. Taking account the other TE data, e.g. Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity, we calculated dimensionless figure of merit, ZT, to be at maximum 0.15 at 800°C.