On the 26th International Conference on Thermoelectrics (ICT2007) held on June 3-7 in Jeju, Korea, Yanzhong Pei as a graduate student from Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, won the 2007 Goldsmid Award for excellence in research on filled skutterudites thermoelectric materials. The Goldsmid Award, initiated by the International Thermoelectric Society (ITS) in 1999 and sponsored by Marlow Industries, Inc, seeks to identify exceptional Ph.D. candidate graduate students who have made unusually notable contributions to thermoelectrics. So far, there have been 6 winners in total from all over the world.

 

CoSb₃-based filled skutterudites have been a focus of research for their prospective thermoelectric applications for decades. To enhance the conversion efficiency of these compounds, lots of efforts have been made by scientists. And recently, being different from typical alkaline-earth- or rare-earth-filled CoSb₃ skutterudites, alkaline-metal-filled skutterudites have been found to possess extremely high filling fractions and high thermoelectric performance based on both theoretical and experimental investigations. Since it is well-known that alkaline metals are very hard to handle and difficult to form filled skutterudites due to the causticity and high vapor pressure, with the creative designs of crucible and continuous optimizations of process parameters, Pei and his colleagues have successfully produced the alkaline-metals-filled skutterudites (K, Na)_xCo₄Sb₁₂ after lots of attempts. The analysis data on those new-type filled skutterudites led to much valuable discoveries such as extreme filling fractions of K (~45%) and Na (~65%), abnormal transport properties and high thermoelectric performance (ZT=1.25 for Na_0.48Co₄Sb₁₂). These achievements would provide a new approach to synthesize novel filled skutterudite compounds and to further optimize the thermoelectric performance of this family of materials, and won high praise from the Award Selection Committee and experts in the same field.