Ideal near-field thermophotovoltaic cells

Abstract

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 emitter-absorber pair in the thermophotovoltaic system. This form reveals that semiconducting materials with narrowband absorption spectra are critical to the energy conversion efficiency. This essential feature is unavailable in conventional bulk semiconductor cells but can be obtained using low dimensional materials. Our results show that the presence of matched van Hove singularities resulting from quantum-confinement in the emitter and absorber of a thermophotovoltaic cell boosts both the magnitude and spectral selectivity of radiative heat transfer; dramatically improving energy conversion efficiency. We provide a model near-field thermophotovoltaic system design making use of this idea by employing the van Hove singularities present in carbon nanotubes. Shockley-Queisser analysis shows that the predicted heat transfer characteristics of this model device are fundamentally better than existing thermophotovoltaic designs. Our work paves the way for the use of quantum dots, quantum wells, two-dimensional semiconductors, semiconductor nanowires and carbon nanotubes as future materials for thermophotovoltaic cells.

arXiv comment9 pages, 5 figures

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• Plasmonic materials for energy: from physics to applications
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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Broadening near-field emission for performance enhancement in thermophotovoltaics
• Macroscopically Aligned Carbon Nanotubes as a Refractory Platform for Hyperbolic Thermal Emitters
• Design of an indium arsenide cell for near-field thermophotovoltaic devices
• Material Scaling and Frequency-Selective Enhancement of Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer for Lossy Metals in Two Dimensions via Inverse Design
• Inelastic thermoelectric transport and fluctuations in mesoscopic system
• Thermal graphene metamaterials and epsilon-near-zero high temperature plasmonics
• Phonon-polariton mediated thermal radiation and heat transfer among molecules and macroscopic bodies: nonlocal electromagnetic response at mesoscopic scales
• Extending the thermal near field through compensation in hyperbolic waveguides
• The Quantum Confinement Effect on the Spectrum of Near-Field Thermal Radiation by Quantum Dots
• Moderate-temperature near-field thermophotovoltaic systems with thin-film InSb cells
• High Resolution Measurement of Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer enabled by Nanomechanical Resonators