Affiliation:
1. Hubei Key Laboratory of Plasma Chemistry and Advanced Materials Hubei Engineering Technology Research Center of Optoelectronic and New Energy Materials School of Materials Science and Engineering Wuhan Institute of Technology Wuhan 430205 China
2. Department of Materials Science & Engineering National University of Singapore 9 Engineering Drive 1 117574 Singapore
3. Institute of Materials Research and Engineering A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) 117602 Singapore
Abstract
AbstractThe growing demand for wearable electronics has driven the development of flexible thermoelectric (TE) generators which can harvest waste body heat as a renewable power source. Despite carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns have attracted significant attention as a promising candidate for TE materials, challenges still exist in improving their TE efficiency for commercial applications. Herein, we developed high performance CNT/polyaniline (PANI) yarns by engineering the coating of polyaniline emeraldine base (PANIeb), in which CNT yarns were firstly coated by PANIeb layer and further doped by HCl vapor treatment. With the incorporation of PANIeb, σ and S were simultaneously increased to 1796 S cm−1 and 74.8 μV K−1 for CNT/PANIeb 4–2d fibers, respectively. Further HCl vapor treatment induced greatly increased σ to 3194 S cm−1, but maintained be 83 % value before doping, giving rise to the highest power factor of 1224 μW m−1K−2, higher than pristine CNT yarns of 576 μW m−1K−2. Combining outstanding high TE performance and bending durability, a flexible TE generator was constructed to deliver high out power of 187 nW with temperature gradients of about 30 K. These results demonstrate the potential promise of high‐performance CNT/PANI‐HCl yarns to harvest waste body heat for sustainable power supply.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China