Electron Irradiation of Carbon Nanotubes

Recently, the production of effective thermoelectric materials has been associated with nanostructures. It is based on the use of physical effects that were found in nanostructures, such as size quantization, charge carrier tunneling, phonon scattering on nanostructure surfaces, which is necessary to increase the thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) of thermal to electrical energy converters. The possibility of increasing ZT in superlattices was theoretically shown for the first time in Hicks and Dresselhaus [1]. The possibility of developing effective thermoelectric materials on the basis of nanostructures is predicted in Shevelkov et al., Dmitriev and Zvyagin, and Vineis et al. [2–4]. The approach based on the creation of bulk nanostructured thermoelectric materials is very perspective [5]. Theoretical calculations were performed in Eletsky and Bulat and Millet-Severin [6, 7], demonstrating the possibility of increasing ZT due to electron tunneling through the gap between nanoparticles, in addition to the occurrence of conditions under which the phonon mean free path is limited by the size of structural units or the gap between particles. In Shevelkov [2], the increase in ZT values is attributed to the effective dispersion of phonons at numerous grain interfaces in nanomaterials, leading to a stronger decrease in lattice thermal conductivity, compared with a decrease in electrical conductivity, which is necessary to increase the σ/λ ratio [8–10].