Filled skutterudites are promising thermoelectric materials due to reduced thermal
conductivity upon inserting a guest atom or ‘rattler’ into the CoSb3 structure. By using an
indium rattler dimensionless Figure of Merit (ZT) values > 1 at 650 K have been reported.
The conventional synthesis of these compounds typically takes several days (~ 3 days) to
obtain the final well-sintered material for property measurements. We report here a
microwave-assisted synthesis method that reduces the initial calcination time from two days
to two minutes. This route significantly reduces the time needed to produce materials
suitable for property and device testing.