ICT2014 Abstracts

Recently, lots of experimental studies found that inserting nanopores into skutterudite materials can remarkably reduce the thermal conductivity and significantly improve the thermoelectric performance, the research of nanoporous CoSb₃ materials has been attracting much attention. However, previous studies mainly focus on the preparation of nanoporous CoSb₃ and the effect of different geometrical sizes on thermal conductivity and thermoelectric properties. In this paper, the mechanical behavior of crystalline CoSb₃ with nanopores under uniaxial tension and compression are studied by the molecular dynamics method. The emphasis is on revealing the influences of porosity, temperature and strain rate on the mechanical behavior of nanoporous CoSb₃. The simulation results show that both of the failure patterns under tension and compression are typical brittle fracture. The elastic modulus decreases with the growing porosity, and the relationship between porosity and elastic modulus presents an inversely proportional scaling law. The increasing of temperature would result in a linear degradation of elastic modulus and ultimate strength. The elastic modulus and ultimate strength under uniaxial compression is greater than that of uniaxial tension. The present study provides a groundwork for the future applications of  nanoporous CoSb₃ thermoelectric materials.

Keywords: Mechanical properties, nanopores, CoSb₃, molecular dynamics