Research Progress on Structure-Performance Relationship for Novel 'Quasi-Crystalline' Thermoelectric Compounds in Sublattice Engineering 亚晶格工程与新型"半晶态"热电化合物结构-性能关系研究进展

Thermoelectric materials as novel clean energy materials have application prospects in waste-heat recovery and solid-state refrigeration. The thermoelectric compounds evolve from simple unitary- or binary-component crystalline systems to multinary complex systems. Among them, the multinary diamond-like compounds, the compounds with distinct sublattice and chemical bond hierarchy characteristics and their derivatives exhibit a complex crystalline-amorphous hybrid behavior in an atomic scale and present some transport effects, providing a prospect for the exploration of effects of electrical-thermal transport and systems of thermoelectric materials. This review summarized recent research progress on thermoelectric materials in sublattice engineering, including the structural design of novel "quasi-crystalline" thermoelectric compounds, the optimization of thermoelectric property and the characterization of microstructures in a sublattice scale. In addition, the relationship between the crystalline-semi-crystalline sublattice structure and the thermoelectric property of the compound was also discussed.