Abstract
Thermoelectric technology has not yet been able to reach full-scale market
penetration partly because most commercial materials employed are scarce/-
costly, environmentally unfriendly and in addition provide low conversion
efficiency. The necessity to tackle some of these hurdles leads us to investigate
the suitability of n-type hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (lc-Si: H) in the
fabrication of thermoelectric devices, produced by plasma enhanced chemical
vapour deposition (PECVD), which is a mature process of proven scalability.
This study reports an approach to optimise the thermoelectric power factor
(PF) by varying the dopant concentration by means of post-annealing without
impacting film morphology, at least for temperatures below 550C. Results
show an improvement in PF of more than 80%, which is driven by a noticeable
increase of carrier mobility and Seebeck coefficient in spite of a reduction in
carrier concentration. A PF of 2.08 9 104 W/mK2 at room temperature is
reported for n-type films of 1 lm thickness, which is in line with the best
values reported in recent literature for similar structures.
penetration partly because most commercial materials employed are scarce/-
costly, environmentally unfriendly and in addition provide low conversion
efficiency. The necessity to tackle some of these hurdles leads us to investigate
the suitability of n-type hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (lc-Si: H) in the
fabrication of thermoelectric devices, produced by plasma enhanced chemical
vapour deposition (PECVD), which is a mature process of proven scalability.
This study reports an approach to optimise the thermoelectric power factor
(PF) by varying the dopant concentration by means of post-annealing without
impacting film morphology, at least for temperatures below 550C. Results
show an improvement in PF of more than 80%, which is driven by a noticeable
increase of carrier mobility and Seebeck coefficient in spite of a reduction in
carrier concentration. A PF of 2.08 9 104 W/mK2 at room temperature is
reported for n-type films of 1 lm thickness, which is in line with the best
values reported in recent literature for similar structures.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-8 |
| Journal | Journal of Electronic Materials |
| Early online date | 30 Nov 2017 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 30 Nov 2017 |
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Cite this
Acosta, E., Wight, N., Smirnov, V., Buckman, J., & Bennett, N. (2017). Hydrogenated Nano-/Micro-Crystalline Silicon Thin-Films for Thermoelectrics. Journal of Electronic Materials, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-017-5977-8