Bismuth based Half Heusler Alloys with giant thermoelectric figure of merit

TL;DR

This study uses ab-initio calculations to evaluate the thermoelectric properties of three newly proposed Bismuth-based Half Heusler alloys, predicting high figures of merit that could guide future experimental research.

Contribution

It introduces three new Bismuth-based Half Heusler alloys and provides detailed theoretical predictions of their thermoelectric properties, including ZT values, to guide experimental validation.

Findings

High power factor observed in the alloys.

Predicted ZT values up to 0.45 for ideal crystals.

Guidance for optimal doping concentrations provided.

Abstract

Half Heusler (HH) thermoelectric alloys provide a wide platform to choose materials with non-toxic and earth abundant elements. This article presents an ab-initio theoretical evaluation of electrical and thermal transport properties of three Bismuth-based most promising thermoelectric alloys, selected out of 54 stable HH compounds. These are brand new compounds which are recently proposed to be stable (Nature Chem. 7, 308 (2015)) and may have interesting properties. The calculated band structure of the three compounds, namely HfRhBi, ZrIrBi and ZrRhBi, served as a hint for their promising thermoelectric properties. To gain confidence on the theoretical predictions of these unreported systems, we first checked our calculated results for a well studied similar compound, ZrNiSn, and showed reasonable agreement with the measured ones. HfRhBi and ZrIrBi turn out to be narrow band gap while ZrRhBi is a moderate band gap semiconductor. A detailed study of the carrier concentration and temperature dependance of the Seebeck coefficient (S), Power factor (S$^2 \sigma$), lattice ($\kappa_L$) and electronic ($\kappa_e$) thermal conductivity and hence the figure of merit (ZT) is carried out. In contrast to most promising known thermoelectric materials, we found high power factor for these materials (highest S$^2 \sigma\sim$17.36 mWm$^{-1}$K$^{-2}$ for p-type ZrIrBi). All the three systems (specially p-type) show high figure of merit, with ZT value as high as 0.45 for ideal crystal. Maximum ZT and the corresponding optimal n- and p-type doping concentrations ($n_c$) are calculated for all the three compounds, which shall certainly pave guidance to future experimental work.