Practical High-Performance (Bi,Sb)Te-Based Thermoelectric Nanocomposites Fabricated by Nanoparticle Mixing and Scrap Recycling.

BiTe-based compounds are the most mature and widely used thermoelectric materials. However, industrial device fabrication will inevitably produce a lot of BiTe scraps, which results in wastes of expensive material resources. In this work, we recycled -type (Bi,Sb)Te scraps and reprocessed them by making nanocomposites with nano-SiC. The thermoelectric performance was enhanced, and a high value of 1.07 was achieved, which is a significant improvement compared with commercial -type (Bi,Sb)Te ingots. Also, the hardness showed a notable increase, which is beneficial for device fabrication. In addition, we adjusted the proportion of Bi/Te of the commercial -type (Bi,Sb)Te scraps, thereby improving the thermoelectric performance and obtaining a higher value of 1.2.