Nanostructured Zinc Oxide as a Prospective Room Temperature Thermoelectric Material

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that nanostructured zinc oxide exhibits significantly reduced thermal conductivity at room temperature, indicating its potential as an effective thermoelectric material.

Contribution

The paper reports the synthesis and characterization of nanostructured ZnO with suppressed thermal conductivity, highlighting its potential for room temperature thermoelectric applications.

Findings

Thermal conductivity reduced by a factor of ~50 compared to bulk ZnO.

Nanostructured ZnO has an average crystallite size of 20 nm.

Phase purity confirmed by XRD and FE-SEM analyses.

Abstract

Nanostructured Zinc oxide (ZnO) was synthesized via a ball milling for 10 hours using high energy planetary ball mill. Phase purity and homogeneity of all the samples have been investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM). All the diffraction peaks can be indexed to the hexagonal phase ZnO with hexagonal symmetry (space group P63mc). Average crystallite size was observed to be 20 nm. There was a remarkable suppression in thermal conductivity ({\kappa}) compared to the bulk values by a factor of ~50 at room temperature. This suggests to the possibility of using nanostructured ZnO as a prospective room temperature thermoelectric material.