Investigation into thermoelectric performance of a flexible n-type nanocomposite film from the AgxSe nanotube composited with PPy

Silver selenide (Ag2Se) has turn up as a promising n-type thermoelectric (TE) material. Especially, the Ag2Se nanotubes may be more attractive in view of their one-dimensional hollow tubular nanostructure. Regrettably, the TE application of Ag2Se nanotubes has not yet been reported so far, probably due to their hard accessibility and poor processability. In this work, we developed a simple and efficient template-free electrochemical deposition method for preparing AgxSe nanotubes, and thus investigated the TE application of the AgxSe-nanotube films electrochemically composited with polypyrrole (PPy). It was found that the incorporation of PPy into the n-type AgxSe-nanotube films not only settled the issues of their high brittleness and easy oxidation, but also significantly improved their TE performance through the synergistic effects. Consequently, the AgxSe nanotube/PPy composite film achieved a maximum power factor of 282.8 ± 16.5 μW m1 K2, which is nearly twice that of the pure AgxSe-nanotube film.