Selective emitters design and optimization for thermophotovoltaic applications

Abstract

Among several solutions to exploit solar energy, thermophotovoltaics (TPV) have been popularized and have known great breakthroughs during the past two decades. Yet, existing systems still have low efficiencies since the wavelength range of optimal photovoltaic (PV) conversion is very small compared to the emitter spectral range. Selective emitters are a very promising solution to this problem. We developed numerical tools to design and optimize such emitters. Some of the resulting structures composed of two or four layers of metals and semiconductors are presented in this paper. We also show that the usual PV devices efficiency limits (30% for crystalline silicon under solar radiation, according to Shockley-Queisser model) can be easily overcome thanks to these structures.

12 pages, 10 figures

Cited by in corpus (8)

• High temperature epsilon-near-zero and epsilon-near-pole metamaterial emitters for thermophotovoltaics
• A simple radiative thermal diode
• Nonreciprocal radiative heat transfer between two planar bodies
• Overcoming limits to near-field radiative heat transfer in uniform planar media through multilayer optimization
• Thermal graphene metamaterials and epsilon-near-zero high temperature plasmonics
• Maximal near-field radiative heat transfer between two plates
• Wideband Mid Infrared Absorber using surface Doped Black Silicon
• Far-field heat transfer and monochromatic thermal currents in a cylindrical nonreciprocal cavity