Related papers: Harvesting Energy from Sun, Outer Space, and Soil
The possibility of night-time power generation has recently stimulated interest in using the radiative sky cooling mechanism with thermoelectric generators (TEG). These passive, low-temperature difference devices have been shown to generate…
Underground infrastructure networks form the backbone of vital supply and disposal systems. However, they are under-monitored in comparison to their value. This is due, in large part, to the lack of energy supply for monitoring and data…
Solar cell thermal recovery is recently attracting more and more attention in the research community as a viable solution to increase photovoltaic efficiency. However the convenience of the implementation of such strategy is bound to the…
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,…
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…
Utilizing solar energy to meet space heating and domestic hot water demand is very efficient (in terms of environmental footprint as well as cost), but in order to ensure that user demand is entirely covered throughout the year needs to be…
This work investigates an alternative to thermophotovoltaics for harvesting thermal and optical energy via photon coupling and thermionic energy conversion. In this device, a heat source is radiatively coupled to a thermionic electron…
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…
To collect additional solar energy during the hours of darkness and to overcome the limited Terrestrial solar power due to the diurnal day night cycle, the concept of a Geostationary Tethered Collecting Solar Power Satellite System has been…
For commercial one-sun solar modules, up to 80% of the incoming sunlight may be dissipated as heat, potentially raising the temperature 20 C - 30 C higher than the ambient. In the long term, extreme self-heating erodes efficiency and…
In this proposal, a cost-effective energy harvesting and management system have been proposed. The regular power keeps around 200 Watt while the peak power can reach 300 Watt. The cost of this system satisfies the requirements and budget…
We propose a concentrated thermionic emission solar cell design, which demonstrates a high solar-to-electricity energy conversion efficiency larger than 10\% under 600 sun, by harnessing the exceptional electrical, thermal and radiative…
Use of lighter than air platforms (aerostats and airships) for reconnaissance and surveillance over long periods can be facilitated by generation of power on-board through solar photovoltaic arrays. Attempts to integrate solar photovoltaic…
The commercially available 4000-Watt continuous-wave Erbium-doped-fiber laser, emitting at the 1567-nanometer wavelength where the atmosphere has high transmission, provides an opportunity for harvesting electric power at remote off the…
A quintessential source of heat, the Sun radiates toward the Earth a power ten thousand times greater than humanity's energy needs. Harnessing this energy bounty, however, requires capturing and converting sunlight. Today, this conversion…
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…
Thermophotovoltaic systems in principle enable utilization of heat that is usually regarded as wasted energy. However, the wavelength selectivity of the thermal emitter required for high efficiencies is rather difficult to control with…
Developing low-weight, frugal and sustainable power sources for resource-limited settings appears to be a challenging proposition for the advancement of next-generation sensing devices and beyond. Here, we report the use of centimeter-sized…
Atmospheric water harvesting technology, which extracts moisture from ambient air to generate water, is a promising strategy to realize decentralized water production. However, the prohibitively high energy consumption of heat-induced…
Hot carrier solar cells allow potential efficiency close to the thermodynamical limit in ideal conditions. However, the feasability of such devices has not been clearly stated so far and only ideal cells were considered in previous studies.…