Investigation of the initial stages of spark-plasma sintering of Si-Ge based thermoelectric materials

Thermoelectric materials based on a mixture of Ge-Si nanopowders were fabricated and investigated. The materials were obtained by spark plasma sintering technique using the modes corresponding to the initial stages of sintering of the powder particles. The possibility for controlling the electrical characteristics of materials (type and magnitude of conductivity, the Seebeck coefficient) by varying the sintering parameters was shown. It was found that the analysis of electrical characteristics allows one to draw conclusions about the degree of mixing for silicon and germanium in the sintered material.