On November 19, 2021, Chongqing Municipal Government held the award ceremony of Chongqing Science and Technology Award for 2020. Professors Xiaoyuan Zhou and Xu Lu, together with Professor Han Guang from the School of Materials, Researcher Wang Guanyu from Chongqing Institute of Green Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Professor Xiaodong Han from Beijing University of Technology, jointly declared the project, "Energy band modulation and phonon engineering of low-dimensional thermoelectric materials ", won the first prize of Chongqing Natural Science Award.
Thermoelectric devices can realize the direct conversion of heat and electricity, which is a green energy conversion technology. The thermoelectric performance is closely related to the material energy band structure and phonon transport, and how to improve the electrical transport performance and suppress the phonon heat transfer is the core scientific problem of thermoelectric research. The project team focused on low-dimensional thermoelectric materials with specific energy band structure and thermal transport properties, and developed single-crystal growth techniques for layered structures, broke through the bottleneck of multi-system single-crystal preparation, obtained large-size single crystals such as SnSe1-xSx, and obtained the highest average zT at that time by solid solution and doping synergistic regulation of electrical and thermal transport (Figure 2), found that the coexistence of strong and weak chemical bonds leads to strong lattice non-simplicity, and proposed We found that the coexistence of strong chemical bonds led to strong lattice non-simplexity, and proposed a new idea of low-dimensional crystal structure to design intrinsically low thermal conductivity materials, and developed a new Cr-based low-dimensional thermoelectric material (Figure 3); the first synthesis of ortho-icosahedral five times twins in the complex compound Cu5FeS4 (Figure 4), which introduced the concept of "twin engineering" into the field of thermoelectrics, and developed a new type of thermoelectric material based on microstructure design and interface density regulation. The team has developed thermoelectric materials with synergistic optimization of electrical and thermal transport based on microstructure design and interface density regulation.
The research results of the team have been published in Energy Environ. Sci., Mater. Today, Adv. Energy Mater. and Adv. Funct. Mater. and other high-level academic journals, and have been highly evaluated by well-known scholars at home and abroad in top journals such as Science and Chem. Rev. The research has been cited 204 times (Web of Science), and has been highly cited for 4 consecutive years. The team was invited to write a review on "Routes for High-Performance Thermoelectric Materials" in Mater. Today. They were also invited to write a chapter on SnS thermoelectric materials for the monograph "Novel Thermoelectric Materials and Device Design Concepts" published by Springer. Xiaoyuan Zhou, the first co-author, received the "2018 ICT Young Investigator Award" (International Thermoelectric Society Young Scientist Award, only one person in the world receives the award each year).She has made more than 50 invited presentations at academic conferences such as the International Conference on Thermoelectrics (ICT), the American Materials Conference (MRS), the European Materials Conference (EMRS), the China Materials Conference and the China Physics Conference, demonstrating the international academic influence of the project group in this research area and her significant contribution to the basic research of energy thermoelectrics.
