UiO-67 Based Conductive Composites: Preparation and Thermoelectric Performance

Thermoelectric materials are functional materials that can realize the direct conversion between heat and electricity, which have great prospects in the field of green refrigeration and waste heat recovery. To date, researches on thermoelectric materials mainly focus on semiconducting inorganic materials and conductive polymers. Although great progress has been made regarding material design and performance improvement, it is still of great significance to explore and expand thermoelectric candidates for potential application. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous extended solids formed by coordination bonds between organic ligands and metal ions or metal clusters. They are promising candidates in the field of thermoelectrics due to their unique porous structure as well as tunable composition and structure, which could meet the requirement of "electron crystal-phonon glass". In this work, conductive polymer, poly(3, 4-vinyl dioxythiophene) (PEDOT) was in-situ polymerized in Zr-based MOFs UiO-67 through "conductive guest-promoted transport" approach. The confined effects originated from porous structures of MOFs on molecular chains of PEDOT effectively improve electrical conductivity of the composites. As a result, the prepared composites exhibit an electrical conductivity up to 5.96x10(-3) S.cm(-1) at room temperature, which is one order of magnitude higher than the corresponding PEDOT. Correspondingly, their power factor (PF) is up to 3.67x10(-2) nW.m(-1).K-2 at room temperature. In conclusion, this work uses ordered porous structures of MOFs as reaction platform and constructs conductive polymer/MOFs conductive materials by facile in-situ polymerization methods, providing a reference for further development of MOFs-based thermoelectric materials.