Related papers: Efficiency in nanostructured thermionic and thermo…
Thermionic converters generate electricity from thermal energy in a power cycle based on vacuum emission of electrons. While thermodynamically efficient, practical implementations are limited by the extreme temperatures required for…
We theoretically investigate nonlinear ballistic thermoelectric transport in a superlattice-structured nanowire. By a special choice of nonuniform widths of the superlattice barriers - analogous to anti-reflection coating in optical systems…
A nanostructured thermoelectric device is designed by connecting a double-barrier resonant tunneling heterostructure to two electron reservoirs. Based on Landauers equation and Fermi-Dirac statistics, the exact solution of the heat flow is…
We examine the efficiency of an effective two-terminal thermoelectric device under broken time-reversal symmetry. The setup is derived from a three-terminal thermoelectric device comprising a thermal terminal and two electronic contacts,…
Thermoelectric devices are heat engines, which operate as generators or refrigerators using the conduction electrons as a working fluid. The thermoelectric heat-to-work conversion efficiency has always been typically quite low, but much…
We describe a strategy for conversion of optical power into DC electrical power using resonant absorption in plasmonic nanostructures. A thermodynamic analysis of the underlying mechanism motivates our description of the phenomenon, which…
In this paper, we propose van del Waals heterostructure-based thermionic devices for the applications in cooling and power generation in the temperature range of 300 to 400 K. By using two-dimensional materials of low cross-plane thermal…
The wave-like nature of electrons leads to the existence of upper bounds on the thermoelectric response of nanostructured devices [R. S. Whitney, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 130601 (2014); Phys. Rev. B 91, 115425 (2015)]. This fundamental result,…
Thermionics and thermophotovoltaics are solid-state technologies that convert high-temperature heat into electricity by utilizing fundamental particles, electrons in thermionics and photons in thermophotovoltaics, as energy carriers. Both…
Thermal transport in nanostructures plays a critical role in modern technologies. As devices shrink, techniques that can measure thermal properties at nanometer and nanosecond scales are increasingly needed to capture transient,…
Inhomogeneously doped thermoelectric nanomaterials with a delta-function electronic density of states can operate with Carnot efficiency in the absence of phonon heat leaks. Here we self-consistently calculate the efficiency and power from…
We find a new phenomenon, a particle like an electron, which transfers kinetic energy to other subject undergoes a decrease in its wave packet size in space and an electron that gains kinetic energy experiences an enlargement of its…
The field of thermoelectric materials has undergone a revolutionary transformation over the last couple of decades as a result of the ability to nanostructure and synthesize myriads of materials and their alloys. The ZT figure of merit,…
Low-dimensional electronic systems in thermoelectrics have the potential to achieve high thermal-to-electric energy conversion efficiency. A key measure of performance is the efficiency when the device is operated under maximum power…
Nanophotonic engineering of light-matter interaction at subwavelength scale allows thermal radiation that is fundamentally different from that of traditional thermal emitters and provides exciting opportunities for various thermal-photonic…
Thermoelectric devices convert temperature gradients into electrical power and vice versa, thus enabling energy scavenging from waste heat, sensing and cooling. Yet, many of these attractive applications are hindered by the limited…
Grain boundaries are commonly observed in carbon nanostructures, but their influence on thermal and electric properties are still not completely understood. Using a combined approach of density functional tight-binding theory and…
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…
Large efforts in improving thermoelectric energy conversion are devoted to energy filtering by nanometer size potential barriers. In this work we perform an analysis and optimization of such barriers for improved energy filtering. We merge…
Power and efficiency of heat engines are two conflicting objectives, and a tight efficiency bound is expected to give insights on the fundamental properties of the power-efficiency tradeoff. Here we derive an upper bound on the efficiency…