ABSTRACT
Up to now, the nanostructured TE materials mainly include three kinds of materials, that is, lowdimensional materials, nanograin-sized materials, and nanocomposites. From the traditional view, thermoelectric materials are expected to be pure semiconductors without any secondary phase to avoid the impurity scattering to electrons. It has been proved that, by both theoretical predication and experimental results, the TE performance of large-scale composites is just a compromise of the two (or more) phases. However, with the progress of fabrication technique and microstructure characterization, when the second phase goes into nanosize, TE performance can be improved if the nanoinclusions scattering is applied to appropriately tuning the transport of electrons and phonons. And bulk nanocomposites, which contain nanoinclusions dispersing in the matrix, are expected to be one of the most potential thermoelectric materials for wide use in the future.
