A Study Of The Heusler Alloy (Fe₂V_0.8W_0.2Al)

Thermoelectric materials offer a great potential for directly converting heat into electricity and are essential for wide-scale renewable energy application. For practical thermoelectric generation applications, a large figure of merit (ZT) is beneficial. The goal of our research is to search for large figure of merit (ZT) thermoelectric materials. Because of their reasonably large ZT values Fe₂V_0.8W_0.2Al and related Heusler systems are potential thermoelectric materials. Here we describe synthesis, as well as experimental details and numerical results on thermal and electrical properties of bulk Fe₂V_0.8W_0.2Al. Briefly, we find that both electrical resistivity, r and thermal conductivity, k increases with temperature. For instance, around room temperature over 100K, both r and K increase by ~10% . Also, Seebeck coefficient is about 40 μV/K around room temperature and mildly increases with increasing temperature The implication of these results will be discussed.