Related papers: Empirical Thermophotovoltaic Performance Predictio…
Taking into account the temperature gradients in solar cells, it is shown that their efficiency can be increased beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit (J. Appl. Phys. 32 (1961) 510). The driving force for this gain is the temperature gradient…
Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion efficiency has recently surpassed 30%. The key behind such high efficiency is the inclusion of a highly efficient mirror in the rear of the TPV cell that turns back to the thermal emitter the…
Germanium telluride (GeTe) having a direct bandgap of 0.6 eV has mainly been in phase change memory and thermoelectric power generation. In this article, we study the electronic structure of the GeTe by first-principles calculations. The…
Frequency up-conversion of few low-energy photons into a single high-energy photon, greatly contributes to imaging, light sources, detection and other fields of research. However, it offers negligible efficiency when up-converting many…
Numerical and semi-analytical models are presented for photon-enhanced-thermionic-emission (PETE) devices. The models take diffusion of electrons, inhomogeneous photogeneration, and bulk and surface recombination into account. The…
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…
Thermoelectric (TE) heat pumps are a promising solid-state technology for space cooling and heating owing to their unique advantages such as environmental friendliness with no harmful refrigerants, small form factors, low noise, robustness…
The theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell is typically characterized by a detailed balance of optical absorption and emission for a semiconductor in the limit of unity radiative efficiency and an ideal step-function response for…
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…
In parallel-connected cells, cell-to-cell (CtC) heterogeneities can lead to current and thermal gradients that may adversely impact the battery performance and aging. Sources of CtC heterogeneity include manufacturing process tolerances,…
In order to improve performance of photovoltaic/thermal (or PV/T for simplicity) collectors, this paper firstly validated a previous computational thermal model and then introduced an improved computational thermal model to investigate the…
A thermoelectric device is a heat engine that directly converts heat into electricity. Many materials with a high figure of merit ZT have been discovered in anticipation of a high thermoelectric efficiency. However, there has been a lack of…
Improvement of thermoelectric systems in terms of performance and range of applications relies on progress in materials science and optimization of device operation. In this chapter, we focuse on optimization by taking into account the…
Linear programming is used as a standard tool for optimising unit commitment or power flows in energy supply systems. For heat supply systems, however, it faces a relevant limitation: For them, energy yield depends on the output…
New strategy is presented to optimize the performance of Thermoelectric (TE) coolers. This approach breaks optimizing TE coolers free from traditional methods of controlling temperature or engineering materials and the structural properties…
Numerous studies have reported performance enhancement of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) system when an emitter is separated by nanoscale gaps from a TPV cell. Although a $p$-$n$-junction-based TPV cell has been widely used for the near-field…
Situations where a spontaneous process of energy or matter transfer is enhanced by an external device are widespread in nature (human sweating system, enzyme catalysis, facilitated diffusion across bio-membranes, industrial heat…
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…
Due to embedded systems` stringent design constraints, much prior work focused on optimizing energy consumption and/or performance. Since embedded systems typically have fewer cooling options, rising temperature, and thus temperature…
Transition-edge sensors (TESs) are capable of highly accurate single particle energy measurement. TESs have been used for a wide range of photon detection applications, particularly in astronomy, but very little consideration has been given…