To improve the thermoelectric properties of LaCeFe3CoSb12 skutterudite materials, the LaCeFe3CoSb12 nanopowders of disordered structure were fabricated through a laser melting and quenching process and then were hot pressed into bulk pellets with the coexistence of ordered and disordered structures by mixing the disordered powders with the raw LaCeFe3CoSb12 crystalline materials. The results suggest that the introduced disordered structure can increase Seebeck coefficient from 57 to 179 μV/K while reduce thermal conductivity from 3.1 to 1.5 W/(m·K), although electrical conductivity can be decreased from 98,000 to 43,000 S/m, and consequently, figure of merit can be enhanced from 0.11 to 0.90 at 773 K. Therefore, fabricating a material with the coexistence of disordered and ordered structures can be considered as an effective way to obtain a high figure of merit, and this strategy can be also applied to other thermoelectric alloys.

Microstructural change in deformation bands was observed in a Ni-P amorphous alloy using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Bending strain was applied to a micro-sized cantilever beam specimen. A TEM specimen was prepared from the micro-sized specimen with keeping the information on the relationship between the deformed direction and the specimen orientation. TEM observation in deformation bands revealed that plastic deformation induces the precipitation of nanocrystalline Ni particles. An orientation relationship between deformation direction and crystal orientation was obtained, that is, a (111) plane of all crystalline particles are parallel to the side surface of the specimen.