Recent Advances in Nanostructured Thermoelectric Half-Heusler Compounds 英文参考文献.docVIP

Nanomaterials 2012, 2, 379-412; doi:10.3390/nano2040379 OPEN ACCESS nanomaterials ISSN 2079-4991 /journal/nanomaterials Review Recent Advances in Nanostructured Thermoelectric Half-Heusler Compounds Wenjie Xie 1,*, Anke Weidenkaff 1, Xinfeng Tang 2, Qingjie Zhang 2, Joseph Poon 3 and Terry M. Tritt 4,* 1 Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Solid State Chemistry and Catalysis, CH-8600 Dubendorf, Switzerland; E-Mail: anke.weidenkaff@empa.ch 2 State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China; E-Mails: tangxf@ (X.T.), zhangqj@ (Q.Z.) 3 Department of Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4714, USA; E-Mail: sjp9x@ 4 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Department of Materials Science Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0978, USA * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mails: wenjie.xie@empa.ch (W.X.); ttritt@ (T.M.T.); Tel.:+41-58-765-4861 (W.X.); +1-864-656-5319 (T.M.T); Fax: +41-58-765-4019 (W.X.); +1-864-656-0805 (T.M.T.). Received: 28 September 2012; in revised form: 5 November 2012 / Accepted: 5 November 2012 / Published: 14 November 2012 Abstract: Half-Heusler (HH) alloys have attracted considerable interest as promising thermoelectric (TE) materials in the temperature range around 700 K and above, which is close to the temperature range of most industrial waste heat sources. The past few years have seen nanostructuing play an important role in significantly enhancing the TE performance of several HH alloys. In this article, we briefly review the recent progress and advances in these HH nanocomposites. We begin by presenting the structure of HH alloys and the different strategies that have been utilized for improving the TE properties of HH alloys. Next, we review the details of HH nanocomposites as obtained by different technique