Synergetic effect of Bi and Al co-doping in GeTe-based thermoelectric materials leading to optimized carrier concentration tuning and high ZT

Improving the performance of thermoelectric (TE) materials that can convert waste heat into electricity is becoming increasingly important. Accordingly, the dimensionless figure of merit, ZT needs to be increased. Al, a group-III element, has not been widely used as a dopant in GeTe-based thermoelectric materials because it acts as a p-type dopant and thus further increases the hole carrier concentration of GeTe, which has already a high intrinsic hole concentration due to inherent Ge vacancies. Therefore, Al as a dopant in GeTe has been considered to have detrimental effects on the resulting thermoelectric performance. In this study, we aim to enhance the suitability of Al doping in GeTe-based materials through synergistically co-doping it with Bi. In this case, co-doping Al and Bi optimizes the carrier concentration and induces a high Seebeck coefficient from an additional increased effective mass and low total thermal conductivity arising from the numerous phonons scattering centers and decreased electronic contribution to heat transport. Consequently, a maximum ZT of ∼1.95 at 673 K with an increased average ZT is achieved. These results indicate that the p-type dopant Al, co-doped with Bi in GeTe-based thermoelectric materials is one of the very effective dopants which can eventually improve the overall TE performance of these materials for useful waste heat recovery application and cooling.