A Comparative Study of Antimony Telluride and Bismuth Telluride for Thermoelectric Generation

The present work presents a comparative study of the thin film thermoelectric generators (TEG) followed by facile growth of nanoparticles of both materials by hydrothermal synthesis. The morphological and structural studies of the prepared nanomaterial for the TEG application are carried out using characterization techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) and UV–Visible spectroscopy. The growth of thin film is carried out using the thermal evaporation technique. The thermal studies of the grown films are performed by an indigenously developed thermoelectric measurement setup creating the thermal gradient on both the ends of the thin films. Antimony telluride showed better results than bismuth telluride till 45 °C however at slightly higher temperatures Bismuth Telluride provides better thermoelectric voltage generation. Seebeck coefficient is calculated from the results obtained for Bismuth Telluride and Antimony Telluride and found to be 366.9 and 226.8 μV/K, respectively.