Effect of surfactant concentration on the morphology and thermoelectric power factor of PbTe nanostructures prepared by a hydrothermal route

Hydrothermal method as a facile bottom-up synthesis technique has many advantages for manufacturing various nanomaterials with controlled properties. In this work, lead telluride nanostructures were synthesized via a simple hydrothermal method at different surfactant concentrations. It was observed that the surfactant concentration has considerable effect on the morphology, and size of the synthesized nanostructures and thus the thermoelectric performance. In the present work, several techniques were used to characterize the structure, morphology, composition and optical properties of the synthesized PbTe nanostructures including XRD, TEM, EDS as well as PL and Raman spectroscopy. The electrical and thermoelectric properties were studied in the temperature range from 300 to 550 K. The results demonstrate that increasing the surfactant concentration improves the power factor due to a significant enhancement in the Seebeck coefficient.