Recovery of waste heat from internal combustion engines is one strategy for meeting the ever increasing demand for more fuel efficient-automobiles. Thermoelectric materials are capable of this, by solid-state conversion of thermal to electrical energy, but the efficiency of this energy conversion requires improvement. In this work the thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) was improved by combining phonon scattering with grain boundary modification in a bismuth antimony telluride nanocomposite material with zinc antimony grain boundaries and zinc oxide nanoparticle inclusions. The advantage of including these zinc nanostructures is discussed. By reducing thermal conductivity while increasing the power factor, ZT was been increased from 0.6 to 1.1.
