Mass production of magnesium silicide as a TEG material

Despite the promising property of TEGs to convert waste heat into electrical energy, there is currently no commercial break-through for TEGs although high research efforts are present all around the world. One rather neglected barrier is a possible mass production of the requested materials, which makes TEGs commercially interesting for industry. Instead of in research almost exclusively used processes like spark plasma sintering (SPS) and field activated sintering technology (FAST) this paper presents a method to produce Mg
2
Si with separated compacting and sintering steps. Therefore, an already in industry used sintering process for insulating or metallic materials was transferred to TE-materials by changing the process atmosphere and adding a new developed special stacked set-up. The density-issue of this process was minimized by higher sintering temperatures. RAMAN-spectra, EDX and XRD analysis confirm the desired composition.