Chemical Precipitation Synthesis and Thermoelectric Properties of Copper Sulfide

Earth-abundant copper sulfide compounds have been intensively studied as potential thermoelectric materials due to their high dimensionless figure of merit ZT values. They have a unique phonon-liquid electron-crystal model that helps to achieve high thermoelectric performance. Many methods, such as melting and ball-milling, have been adopted to synthesize this copper sulfide compound, but they both use expensive starting materials with high purity. Here, we develop a simple chemical precipitation approach to synthesize copper sulfide materials through low-cost analytically pure compounds as the starting materials. A high ZT value of 0.93 at 800 K was obtained from the samples annealed at 1273 K. Its power factor is around 8.0 μW cm −1 K −2 that is comparable to the highest record reported by traditional methods. But, the synthesis here has been greatly simplified with reduced cost, which will be of great benefit to the potential mass production of thermoelectric devices. Furthermore, this method can be applied to the synthesis of other sulfur compound thermoelectric materials.