Ph.D. Defense
Understanding the high-pressure behavior of transport properties has been a driving force in the study of materials under extreme conditions for well over a century being pioneered by P.W. Bridgman in the early 20th century. Research dedicated to the study of these properties leads to a variety of important applications: exploration of insulator to semi-conductor to metal structural and electronic phase transitions, correlation of structural phase transitions and the electronic properties along phase boundaries, testing validity of theoretical models, understanding the effects of chemical pressure, among a slew of other applications. This work has designed and developed a specialized sample cell assembly for use with a Paris-Edinburgh press capable of performing high-pressure and high-temperature (HP-HT) electrical resistance, Seebeck coefficient, thermal conductivity measurements alongside energy-dispersive X-ray diffraction and X-ray radiography imagining up to 6 GPa and 500�C to fully characterize the electrical, thermal, and structural properties of materials simultaneously at extreme conditions. This system has been installed at Argonne National Laboratory at the Advanced Photon Source at the Sector 16 BM-B beamline of the High-Pressure Collaborative Access Team and is now available to general users as a measurement technique. Application of this system has been applied to thermoelectric materials: PbTe, SnTe, TiCoSb, and TiNiSn. Thermoelectric materials provide a valuable means of converting waste heat into useful electrical energy and studying their HP-HT properties allows a better understanding and identification of greater efficiency through tuning of transport properties. The detailed discussion of the design and development of this system alongside the important results on the thermoelectric materials mentioned will be presented in this dissertation.
