Improved Thermoelectric Performance of NbCoSb with Intrinsic Nb Vacancies and Ni-Doping-Induced Band Degeneracy

Lately, the nominal 19-electron half-Heusler compound NbCoSb, historically viewed as a metal, has attracted reacquaintance and widespread attention because of its unexpected high thermoelectric (TE) performance. Here, the electronic structures of NbxCo1–yNiySb (x = 0.8, 1; y = 0, 0.1) have been systematically investigated by using the first-principles method and semiclassical Boltzmann transport theory. We demonstrate that Ni doping at Co sites in NbCoSb with 20% intrinsic Nb vacancies (Nb0.8CoSb) leads to a large band degeneracy, and the conduction band edge are mainly provided by the d-orbitals of the Ni, Co, and Nb atoms. The relative localization of the d orbitals not only remarkably increased the density-of-states effective mass near the Fermi energy but also retained a high mobility, which resulted in an optimal electrical conductivity without significant reduction of the Seebeck coefficient (∼−411.08 μV K –1 at 800 K) and thereby a large power factor. Meanwhile, Ni doping still preserved a low lattice thermal conductivity. As a result, a peak zT of 1.18 was achieved at 1100 K in the compound Nb0.8Co0.9Ni0.1Sb with a carrier concentration of 4.35 × 1020 cm–3. The present work identifies that Ni doping is an effective method to improve the TE properties of nominally 19-electron NbCoSb compounds with Nb vacancies and demonstrates the great potential for searching of nonstoichiometric 19-electron half-Heusler compounds with vacancies.