Physicochemical Properties and Thermoelectric Studies of Electrochemically Deposited Lead Telluride Films
Abstract
In recent years, various works has been done for the improvement of thermoelectric (TE) figure of merit of materials. Among the studied TE materials PbTe is a typical intermediate-temperature range TE material, which has undergone extensive developments and achieved excellent high TE performance. PbTe-based TE materials gives the better TE performance by manipulating charge and phonon transports, optimizing carrier density to tune fermi level, tailoring band structure to enhance effective mass, and designing all-scale hierarchical architectures to suppress phonon propagation gives the higher figure merit. In the present work, PbTe films were deposited on a pure copper substrate at room temperature using the three electrode electrodeposition process and various deposition parameters like mass of the material deposited on the substrate and deposition potential of the synthesized PbTe films were optimized. The synthesized film shows well stoichiometric and hydrophilic nature by contact angle measurements. The oxidation and reduction peaks during the cathodic and anodic scan of the electrolyte material are given by cyclic voltammetry (CV). Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) provides the existence of different modes of PbTe in the film. The thermo-emf and thermo-power of the synthesized PbTe film were determined.