Study on n-type PbTe material doped with In and PbI_2

Lead telluride is traditional thermoelectric material at middle temperature and widely applied for electricity generation.They have been attracting many scientists to research on.The paper reports an n-type PbTe materials with high thermoelectric performances based on the traditional halogen-doping mechanism with additional indium.The PbTe based materials doped indium and PbI2 are prepared by powder metallurgy technology.We use an intermediate frequency induced furnace for primary alloy preparation.The alloy shows very homogeneous with the desired composition.Then,the comminuted powder particles are hot pressed under certain temperature,pressure and so on.The authors examined the prepared samples by FETEM and measured their thermoelectric properties.The results indicate that doping with the appropriate PbI2 and indium improved the thermoelectric properties of the PbTe based materials remarkably,and we gained high figure of merit for the materials over a wide temperature range.