A copper-containing oxytelluride as a promising thermoelectric material for waste heat recovery

The new thermoelectric material BiOCuTe exhibits an electrical conductivity of 224 S cm−1 and a Seebeck coefficient of +186 μV K−1 at 373 K, together with an extremely low lattice thermal conductivity of ∼0.5 W m−1 K−1. This results in a ZT of 0.42 at 373 K, which increases to 0.66 at the maximum temperature investigated, 673 K.