Related papers: Hot-carrier thermophotovoltaic systems
We report the fabrication and measurement of thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cells with efficiencies of >40%, which is a record high TPV efficiency and the first experimental demonstration of the efficiency of high-bandgap tandem TPV cells. TPV…
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…
The conventional notion for achieving high efficiency in thermophotovoltaics (TPVs) is to use a monochromatic emission at a photon energy corresponding to the band gap of the cell. Here, we prove theoretically that such a notion is only…
A near-field thermophotovoltaic (TPV) system with a multilayer emitter of alternate tungsten and alumina layer is proposed in this paper. The fluctuational electrodynamics along with the dyadic Green function for a multilayered structure is…
We evaluate near-field thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion systems focusing in particular on their open-circuit voltage (Voc). Unlike previous analyses based largely on numerical simulations with fluctuational electrodynamics, here,…
Heat is an inevitable outcome in energy consumption processes, as more than 65% of input energy is wasted as heat. If we can generate electricity from waste heat, it will help minimize the needs for fossil fuels in power plants and can…
We propose a solar thermal energy conversion system consisting of a solar absorber, a thermoradiative cell or negative illumination photodiode, and a photovoltaic cell. Because it is a heat engine, this system can also be paired with…
Hot-carrier solar cells are envisioned to utilize energy filtering to extract power from photogenerated electron-hole pairs before they thermalize with the lattice, and thus potentially offer higher power conversion efficiency compared to…
Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) converters are capable of generating electrical energy from infrared radiation emitted by an emitter powered by waste heat or solar energy. Key performance metrics for TPV converters are power output density (POD),…
A new approach is introduced to significantly improve the performance of thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems by using low-dimensional thermal emitters and photovoltaic (PV) cells. By reducing the thickness of both the emitter and the PV cell,…
It is well known that performance of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) device can be enhanced if the vacuum gap between the thermal emitter and the TPV cell becomes nanoscale due to the photon tunneling of evanescent waves. Having multiple…
Near-field thermal radiation transfer overcoming the far-field blackbody limit has attracted significant attention in recent years owing to its potential for drastically increasing the output power and conversion efficiency of…
Optimal radiator thermal emission spectra maximizing thermophotovoltaic (TPV) conversion efficiency and output power density are determined when temperature effects in the cell are considered. To do this, a framework is designed in which a…
We ask the question, what are the ideal characteristics of a near-field thermophotovoltaic cell? Our search leads us to a reformulation of near-field radiative heat transfer in terms of the joint density of electronic states of the…
Thermal radiative energy transport is essential for high-temperature energy harvesting technologies, including thermophotovoltaics (TPVs) and grid-scale thermal energy storage. However, the inherently low emissivity of conventional…
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 theoretically show that a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) system enhanced by a wire metamaterial opens the door to a prospective microgap thermophotovoltaics which will combine high electric output with relatively low temperatures of the…
Recently, near-field radiative heat transfer enhancement across nanometer vacuum gaps has been intensively studied between two hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) due to unlimited wavevectors and high photonic density of state. In this work, we…
Thermophotovoltaics (TPV) are a promising new approach for converting heat to electricity. Their performance is primarily characterized by two metrics: efficiency and power density. While recent works have shown high efficiency, it is…
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…