Enhanced Thermoelectric Performance in High Entropy Alloys Sn0.25Pb0.25Mn0.25Ge0.25Te

Entropy is a physical quantity gauging the degree of chaos in the system. High entropy alloying is thus an effective strategy to reduce the lattice thermal conductivity of the thermoelectric materials. In this paper, PbTe, GeTe, and MnTe are coalloyed with SnTe to form a single-phase solid solution. Because of the inclusion of various elements at the cationic (Sn2+) site, the configurational entropy increases, and the phonon scattering is strongly enhanced, leading to a reduced lattice thermal conductivity. In addition, the Seebeck coefficient is improved because of the band modification via this coalloying. Ga is then further doped to optimize the carrier concentration to ∼5.7 × 1020 cm–3 and reduce the room-temperature lattice thermal conductivity to ∼0.6 W m–1 K–1. Finally, a high peak ZT value of ∼1.52 at 823 K and an average ZT value ∼1.0 from 323 to 823 K were obtained in Ga0.025(Sn0.25Pb0.25Mn0.25Ge0.25)0.975Te.