Related papers: Harvesting the electromagnetic energy confined clo…
A huge amount of thermal energy is available close to material surfaces in radiative and non-radiative states, which can be useful for matter characterization or for energy devices. One way to harness this near-field energy is to scatter it…
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…
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…
Recent experimental studies on near-field thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion have mainly focused on enhancing performance via photon tunneling of evanescent waves. In the sub-micron gap, however, there exist peculiar phenomena…
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…
A p-n junction maintained at above ambient temperature can work as a heat engine, converting some of the supplied heat into electricity and rejecting entropy by interband emission. Such thermoradiative cells have potential to harvest…
Energy is a vital resource and hence there is a continuous strive to improve upon existing technologies and to find new ones that address that basic need. The conversion of thermal energy is the primary method of generating electrical…
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…
A novel electromagnetic energy squeezing mechanism is proposed based on the special properties of permeability-near-zero metamaterials. Nearly no energy stream can enter a conventional dielectric region positioned inside a…
In the close vicinity of a hot solid, at distances smaller than the thermal wavelength, a strong electromagnetic energy density exists because of the presence of evanescent field. Here we explore the possibility to harvest this energy using…
A thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy converter harnesses thermal photons emitted by a hot body and converts them to electricity. When the radiative heat exchange between the emitter and PV cell is spectrally monochromatic, the TPV system can…
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…
Thermophotovoltaic devices are energy-conversion systems generating an electric current from the thermal photons radiated by a hot body. In far field, the efficiency of these systems is limited by the thermodynamic Schockley-Queisser limit…
Near-field radiative heat transfer allows heat to propagate across a small vacuum gap in quantities that are several orders of magnitude greater then the heat transfer by far-field, blackbody radiation. Although heat transfer via near-field…
This article proposes a new energy harvesting concept that greatly enhances thermionic power generation with high e ciency by exploiting the near- field enhancement of thermal radiation. The proposed near-field enhanced thermionic energy…
Indoor light is known to be a new energy source to power uW low consumption wireless sensor networks (WSNs). For wireless electronic devices that consume tens of mW, it is still challenging to harvest this amount of power in a low light…
Energy harvesting or power harvesting or energy scavenging is a process where energy is derived from external sources (e.g. solar power, thermal energy, wind energy, salinity gradients, kinetic energy etc.), captured, and stored for small,…
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…
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…
We derive the thermodynamic limits of harvesting power from the outgoing thermal radiation from the ambient to the cold outer space. The derivations are based on a duality relation between thermal engines that harvest solar radiation and…