Related papers: Thermodynamic Limits of Energy Harvesting from Out…

We show that the maximum work that can be obtained from the thermal radiation emitted between two planar sources in the near-field regime is much larger than that corresponding to the blackbody limit. This quantity as well as an upper bound…

While solar power systems have offered a wide variety of electricity generation approaches including photovoltaics, solar thermal power systems, and solar thermoelectric generators, the ability of generating electricity at both the daytime…

We study the thermodynamics of near-field thermal radiation between two identical polar media at different temperatures. As an application, we consider an idealized energy harvesting process from sources at near room temperature at the…

Energy harvesting from sun and outer space using thermoradiative devices (TRD), despite being promising renewable energy sources, are limited only to daytime and nighttime period, respectively. A system with 24-hour continuous energy…

We analyse the process of conversion of near-field thermal radiation into usable work by considering the radiation emitted between two planar sources supporting surface phonon-polaritons. The maximum work flux that can be extracted from the…

Thermoelectric energy harvesters can have a much higher conversion efficiency by implementing quantum dots/wells between the high temperature region and the low temperature region. However they still suffer a limitation of the maximum…

In the close vicinity of a hot body, at distances smaller than the thermal wavelength, a high electromagnetic energy density exists due to the presence of evanescent fields radiated by the partial charges in motion around its surface. This…

The understanding of far-field thermal radiation had directly led to the discovery of quantum mechanics a century ago, and is of great current practical importance for applications in energy conversions, radiative cooling, and thermal…

Historically, battery is the power source for mobile, embedded and remote system applications. However, the development of battery techniques does not follow the Moore's Law. The large physical size, limited electric quantity and high-cost…

Understanding the fundamental limits of various energy conversion approaches is essential for assessing their efficiency and power output. In this work, we derive general performance bounds for thermoradiative heat engines that exchange…

Motivated by damage due to heating in sensor operation, we consider the throughput optimal offline data scheduling problem in an energy harvesting transmitter such that the resulting temperature increase remains below a critical level. We…

Producing useful electrical work in consuming chemical energy, the fuel cell have to reject heat to its surrounding. However, as it occurs for any other type of engine, this thermal energy cannot be exchanged in an isothermal way in finite…

The photoelectric effect induced by blackbody radiation could be a mechanism to harvest ambient thermal energy at a uniform temperature. Here, I describe (without going too much into mathematical details) the theoretical model I developed…

Understanding the thermodynamics of radiation and the quantum-mechanical interactions between light and matter is important both for theoretical purposes and for technological advances, such as determining the limits of key processes like…

We first consider an energy harvesting channel with fading, where only the transmitter harvests energy from natural sources. We bound the optimal long term throughput by a constant for a class of energy arrival distributions. The proposed…

Energy harvesting is a modern concept which makes dissipated heat useful by transferring thermal energy to other excitations. Most of the existing principles for energy harvesting are realized in systems which are heated continuously, for…

Environmentally-powered computer systems operate on renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. While harvesting environmental energy has long been necessary for small-scale embedded…

Photosynthesis is central to Earth's biosphere and a prime candidate for sustaining complex life on habitable exoplanets, yet a thermodynamically consistent treatment of the work potential of stellar radiation at planetary surfaces is still…

This work considers a system with two energy harvesting (EH) nodes transmitting to a common destination over a random access channel. The amount of harvested energy is assumed to be random and independent over time, but correlated among the…

How much work can be extracted from a heat bath using a thermal machine? The study of this question has a very long tradition in statistical physics in the weak-coupling limit, applied to macroscopic systems. However, the assumption that…