Anisotropy and inhomogeneity measurement of the transport properties of spark plasma sintered thermoelectric materials

We report on the development and capabilities of two new measurement systems developed at Fraunhofer-IPM. The first measurement system is based on an extension of the Van der Pauw method and is suitable for cube-shaped samples. A mapping of the electrical conductivity tensor of a Skutterudite-SPS samples produced at the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Madrid is presented. The second measurement system is a ZTmeter also developed at the Fraunhofer-IPM. It enables the simultaneous measurement of the electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient and thermal conductivity up to 900 K of cubes at least 5x5x5 mm3 in size. The capacity of this measurement system for measuring the anisotropy of the transport properties of a (Bi,Sb)2Te3SPS sample produced by KTH is demonstrated by simply rotating the samples.