Tailoring Nanoporous Structures in BiTe Thin Films for Improved Thermoelectric Performance.

Thin-film thermoelectrics (TEs) with unique advantages have triggered great interest in thermal management and energy harvesting technology for ambient temperature microscale systems. Although they have exhibited a good prospect, their unsatisfactory performances still seriously hamper their widespread application. Tailoring the porous structure has been demonstrated to be a facile strategy to significantly reduce thermal conductivity and enhance the figure of merit () of bulk TE materials; however, it is challenging for thin-film TEs.

Cellulose Fiber-Based Hierarchical Porous Bismuth Telluride for High-Performance Flexible and Tailorable Thermoelectrics.

Porous modification is a general approach to endowing the rigid inorganic thermoelectric (TE) materials with considerable flexibility, however, by which the TE performances are severely sacrificed. Thus, there remains an ongoing struggle against the trade-off between TE properties and flexibility. Herein, we develop a novel strategy to combine BiTe thick film with ubiquitous cellulose fibers (CFs) via an unbalanced magnetron sputtering technique.