A Study on the Electrodeposition Behavior of Cobalt Antimonides in Citric Based Solutions

Thermoelectric (TE) materials are attracting renewed attention for clean energy conversion. Reducing the dimension of materials to 2D/1D (e.g. thin film and nanowire) is one major approach to achieve high figure of merit (ZT) in the existing TE materials system. Electrodeposition has been widely used in fabricating various low dimensional TE materials. However, electrodeposition behavior of CoSb3 skutterudites is rarely reported. In this work, we report the co-deposition behavior of cobalt and antimony in citric based solutions by electrodeposition. The effects of deposition potential and concentration of cobalt and antimony containing precursors were studied. The focus of the study will be on the crystalline properties and chemical composition of the deposited films.