High-Performance Thermoelectric Materials Based on β-Zn4Sb3

Materials based on β-Zn4Sb3have been found to exhibit unusually high values of the dimensionless thermoelectric figure of merit at temperatures between 200 and 400 °C. The discovery that p-type β-Zn4Sb3 is a high-performance thermoelectric material was reported in "Zn4Sb3: A High-Performance Thermoelectric Material" (NPO-19677), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 23, No. 2 (February, 1999), page 54. The development reported here extends beyond that discovery to include solid solutions of β-Zn4Sb3 and Cd4Sb3 (with general compositions given by Zn4-xCdxSb3) in the class of high-performance thermoelectric materials based on β-Zn4Sb3.