Grain size and structure distortion characterization of α-MgAgSb thermoelectric material by powder diffraction

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/aba09c

Abstract

Nanostructuring, structure distortion, and/or disorder are the main manipulation techniques to reduce the lattice thermal conductivity and improve the figure of merit of thermoelectric materials. A single-phase α-MgAgSb sample, MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99, with high thermoelectric performance in near room temperature region was synthesized through a high-energy ball milling with a hot-pressing method. Here, we report the average grain size of 24–28 nm and the accurate structure distortion, which are characterized by high-resolution neutron diffraction and synchrotron x-ray diffraction with Rietveld refinement data analysis. Both the small grain size and the structure distortion have a contribution to the low lattice thermal conductivity in MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99.

Keywords: diffraction grain size structure distortion thermoelectric material

Received: 21 May 2020
Revised: 18 June 2020
Accepted manuscript online: 29 June 2020

PACS:	61.05.cp	(X-ray diffraction)
	61.05.fm	(Neutron diffraction)
	84.60.Rb	(Thermoelectric, electrogasdynamic and other direct energy conversion)

Corresponding Authors: ^†Corresponding author. E-mail: fwwang@iphy.ac.cn

About author:

†Corresponding author. E-mail: fwwang@iphy.ac.cn

* Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11675255) and the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0401503).

Cite this article:

Xiyang Li(李西阳), Zhigang Zhang(张志刚), Lunhua He(何伦华), Maxim Avdeev, Yang Ren(任洋), Huaizhou Zhao(赵怀周), and Fangwei Wang(王芳卫)† Grain size and structure distortion characterization of α-MgAgSb thermoelectric material by powder diffraction 2020 Chin. Phys. B 29 106101

Fig. 1.

(a) Crystalline structure of α-MgAgSb, the space group is I-4c2 (No. 120). (b) The neutron diffraction, and synchrotron x-ray diffraction data of MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99 measured at room temperature.

Fig. 2.

Rietveld refinement of MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99 neutron diffraction data with size parameter refined (a), and without size parameter refined (b).

Table 1.

Refined parameters of MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99 measured by high resolution neutron diffraction and synchrotron x-ray diffraction, respectively.

Fig. 3.

Rietveld refinement of MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99 synchrotron x-ray diffraction data with size parameter refined (a), and without size parameter refined (b).

Fig. 4.

Static structure distortion in MgAg_0.97Sb_0.99. The refined bond distances and bond angles of the nearest Mg–Sb bonds are shown in Table 1. The refinement results show a significant distortion of this Mg–Sb formed distorted NaCl structure.

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Grain size and structure distortion characterization of α-MgAgSb thermoelectric material by powder diffraction

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