ICT2014 Abstracts

Filled skutterudites as high performance thermoelectric materials has attracted worldwide attention for energy harvesting application. Scaling up, which is important for the application of the materials, may deteriorate the homogeneity of the microstructure and composition and thermoelectric properties of materials, especially by the melting-quenching, annealing and sintering process. So it is important to control the ingot microstructure of the skutterudites to get uniform microstructure and composition after annealing and sintering. However, reports on such aspects as the filled skutterudites ingot microstructure control are rare. In this paper, we studied the influence of melt quenching temperature on the ingot microstructure of ytterbium filled skutterudites Yb_0.3Co₄Sb₁₂, hoping to get understanding of the relationship between the primary phase nucleation and ingot microstructure, and to develop a method to control the ingot microstructure of skutterudites.