Greatly enhanced mechanical properties of thermoelectric SnSe through microstructure engineering

• DOI: 10.26599/jac.2023.9220740
• Publication Date: 2023-03-03T09:22:39Z
• Authors: Chen Chen; Bin-Hao Wang; Chen Chen; Hai-Dong Zhao; Bin Zhang; Dan Wang; Tao Shen; Peng-Hui Li; Song Zhao; Dong-Li Yu; Yong-Jun Tian; Bo Xu
• Keywords: Spark Plasma Sintering; Equiaxed crystals; Vickers hardness test

The outstanding thermoelectric materials SnSe is also known for its inferior mechanical properties, which bring great inconvenience application in devices. In this work, bulks were prepared via a sequential procedure of high-pressure synthesis, ball milling, and spark plasma sintering. produced polycrystalline samples with unique microstructure tightly-bound quasi-equiaxed grains exhibited excellent properties. Vickers hardness, compressive strength, bending strength reached 1.1 GPa, 300 MPa, 90 respectively, all are far superior to those ordinary SnSe. Furthermore, the microstructures didn't deteriorate performance. This work demonstrated an effective prepare microstructure-engineered materials, not only show advantages device applications, but shed light on properties enhancement other layer-structured materials.