Rapid synthesis of PbSe by MA and HPS and its thermoelectric properties

Recently, PbSe has attracted extensive attention as an excellent thermoelectric material, which is considered as an alternative for PbTe. In this paper, single-phase PbSe was rapidly synthesized by mechanical alloying followed by high-pressure sintering method. The effect of sintering temperature on the thermoelectric properties of PbSe has been investigated. The resistivity, Seebeck coefficient, and phonon thermal conductivity of PbSe decrease with the increasing sintering temperature due to the formation of native defects during HPS process. The maximum figure of merit ZT value of similar to 0.57 at 600 K was achieved for the sample sintered at 1200 K, which is much higher than that of polycrystalline PbSe around this temperature prepared by other methods. These results indicate that combining with MA and HPS is a simple, energy-saving, and effective method to synthesize and tune the thermoelectric properties for PbSe.