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Nanostructured Zinc Oxide as a Prospective Room Temperature Thermoelectric Material

Nanostructured Zinc oxide (ZnO) was synthesized via a ball milling for 10 hours using high energy planetary ball mill. Phase purity and homogeneity of all the samples have been investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM). All the diffraction peaks can be indexed to the hexagonal phase ZnO with hexagonal symmetry (space group P63mc). Average crystallite size was observed to be 20 nm. There was a remarkable suppression in thermal conductivity (κ) compared to the bulk values by a factor of ~50 at room temperature. This suggests to the possibility of using nanostructured ZnO as a prospective room temperature thermoelectric material.