Nickel films with nanovoids filled with fullerene molecules have been fabricated. The thermoelectric properties of the nanocomposites have been measured from room temperature down to about 30 K. The main idea is that the phonon scattering can be enhanced at the C₆₀/matrix heterointerface. The distribution of atoms within the Ni and Ni-C₆₀ layers has been characterized by Auger depth profiling. The morphology of the grown samples has been checked using cross-sectional scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity have been addressed employing an automatic home-built measuring system. It has been found that nanostructuring using Ar⁺ ion treatment increases the thermopower magnitude over the entire temperature range. Incorporating C₆₀ into the resulting voids further increased the thermopower magnitude below ≈200 K. A maximum increase in the Seebeck coefficient has been measured up to four times in different fabricated samples. This effect is attributed to enhanced scattering of charge carriers and phonons at the Ni/C₆₀ boundary.

The thermal conductivity of epoxy nanocomposites filled with self-assembled hybrid nanoparticles composed of multilayered graphene nanoplatelets and anatase nanoparticles was described using an analytical model based on the effective medium approximation with a reasonable amount of input data. The proposed effective thickness approach allowed for the simplification of the thermal conductivity simulations in hybrid graphene@anatase TiO₂ nanosheets by including the phenomenological thermal boundary resistance. The sensitivity of the modeled thermal conductivity to the geometrical and material parameters of filling particles and the host polymer matrix, filler’s mass concentration, self-assembling degree, and Kapitza thermal boundary resistances at emerging interfaces was numerically evaluated. A fair agreement of the calculated and measured room-temperature thermal conductivity was obtained.

We have investigated doped and undoped layers of microcrystalline silicon prepared by hot-wire chemical vapour deposition optically, electrically and by means of transmission electron microscopy. Besides needle-like crystals grown perpendicular to the substrate's surface, all of the layers contained a noncrystalline phase with a volume fraction between 4% and 25%. A high oxygen content of several per cent in the porous phase was detected by electron energy loss spectrometry. Deep-level transient spectroscopy of the crystals suggests that the concentration of electrically active defects is less than 1% of the undoped background concentration of typically 10¹⁷ cm⁻³. Frequency-dependent measurements of the conductance and capacitance perpendicular to the substrate surface showed that a hopping process takes place within the noncrystalline phase parallel to the conduction in the crystals. The parasitic contribution to the electrical circuit arising from the porous phase is believed to be an important loss mechanism in the output of a pin-structured photovoltaic solar cell deposited by hot-wire CVD.