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Bipolar carrier transport is often a limiting factor in the thermoelectricefficiency of narrow bandgap materials (such as Bi2Te3 and PbTe) at hightemperatures due to the introduction of an additional term to the thermalconductivity and a reduction in the Seebeck coefficient. In this work, wepresent a theoretical investigation into the ability of nanoinclusions toreduce the detrimental effect of bipolar transport. Using the quantummechanical non equilibrium Greens function (NEGF) transport formalism, wesimulate electronic transport through two-dimensional systems containingdensely packed nanoinclusions, separated by distances similar to the electronmean free path. Specifically, considering an n type material, where the bipolareffect comes from the valence band, we insert nanoinclusions that imposepotential barriers only for the minority holes. We then extract the materialselectrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, and electronic thermalconductivity including its bipolar contribution. We show that nanoinclusionscan indeed have some success in reducing the minority carrier transport and thebipolar effect on both the electronic thermal conductivity and the Seebeckcoefficient. The benefits from reducing the bipolar conductivity are larger themore conductive the minority band is to begin with (larger hole mean free pathin particular), as expected. Interestingly, however, the benefits on theSeebeck coefficient and the power factor are even more pronounced not only whenthe minority mean free path is large, but when it is larger compared to themajority conduction band mean free path. Finally, we extract an overallestimate for the benefits that nanoinclusions can have on the ZT figure ofmerit.

Effectiveness of nanoinclusions for reducing bipolar effects in thermoelectric materials