Enhancement of thermoelectric properties of Mg2Si compounds with Bi doping through carrier concentration tuning

The Bi-doped Mg2Si powder was fabricated with solid state reaction method and consolidated with hot pressing method and then its thermoelectric properties were investigated. The n-type transport properties were measured in all samples and temperature dependence of the electrical properties shows a behavior of degenerate semiconductors for Bi-doped samples. The electrical resistivity and the Seebeck coefficient were greatly reduced with Bi, which was mainly due to the increment of the carrier concentration. The samples have maximum carrier concentration of 8.2 × 1018 cm−3. The largest ZT value of 0.61 was achieve at 873 K for Mg2.04SiBi0.02. The Bi-doping was found to be an effective n-type dopant to adjust carrier concentration.