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C1: Waste heat recovery
Studies show that the majority of the wasted heat from industrial and automotive sources is 500oC or less. Skutterudite materials are attractive for thermoelectric waste heat recovery applications because they are relatively inexpensive and give high ZT values for temperatures less than 500oC. This report will discuss our new efforts to synthesize both P and N type skutterudite materials. Evident Technologies has a long history with synthesis of semiconductor nanoparticles for use in thermoelectric and other applications. We study the effects of multiple dopants in the synthesis to reduce the thermal conductivity and maximize ZT values of the materials. We study the annealing and spark plasma sintering processes and try to optimize the performance of the final material while always focusing on scale-up. The synthesis procedures and consolidation parameters were optimized and the batch sizes were scaled up from 25 g to 500g successfully. The results show that the ZT value of our best samples for P type skutterudite materials were 1.2 at 500C, which is better than the state-of-the-art.