Coherent Ag-rich nanoprecipitates/β-Ag2Se flexible film with unprecedented thermoelectric performance by liquid-like sintering

Jie Gao, Jiahui Li, Lei Miao (), Lida Jia, Pengfei Qiu, Tingwei Yin, Sijing Zhu, Xinyu Yang, Jia-Chen Guo, Jun-Liang Chen, Xiaoyang Wang, Eiji Nishibori, Tomohiro Sato and Xun Shi ()
Additional contact information
Jie Gao: Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Jiahui Li: Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Lei Miao: Guangxi University
Lida Jia: Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Pengfei Qiu: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tingwei Yin: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Sijing Zhu: Guangxi University
Xinyu Yang: Guangxi University
Jia-Chen Guo: Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Jun-Liang Chen: Guilin University of Electronic Technology
Xiaoyang Wang: Guangxi University
Eiji Nishibori: University of Tsukuba
Tomohiro Sato: Sinter Land INC.
Xun Shi: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract β-Ag2Se holds a great promise for wearable thermoelectric generators due to its good mechanical properties and biocompatibility. However, optimizing its power factor through alterations in the Ag/Se stoichiometric ratio or incorporating secondary phases has reached the limitation. This work adopts a liquid-like sintering strategy, namely employing the migration and precipitation of silver ions from metallic silver to the silver selenide during the spark plasma sintering process to construct significantly sized and coherent Ag-rich nanoprecipitates within flexible Ag/β-Ag2Se composite films, thereby achieving an unprecedented power factor exceeding 4000 μWm−1K−2 at 303 K. The Ag-rich nanoprecipitates play a crucial role in elevating the carrier concentration, enhancing the density-of-states effective mass, and mitigating carrier scattering caused by phase interfaces and acoustic phonons. The generator containing 5 pieces of optimal films shows an normalized output power density of 10.89 μWcm−1K−2 under a temperature difference of 26.0 K. This study strongly suggests that the creation of Ag-rich nanoprecipitates is an effective avenue for improving the electrical performance of β-Ag2Se-based thermoelectric materials.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61079-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-61079-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61079-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().