Enhancing thermophotovoltaic performance using graphene-BN-InSb near-field heterostructures

Abstract

Graphene---hexagonal-boron-nitride---InSb near-field structures are designed and optimized to enhance the output power and energy efficiency of the thermophotovoltaic systems working in the temperature range of common industrial waste heat, $400\mathrm{K}\sim 800\mathrm{K}$, which is also the working temperature range for conventional thermoelectric devices. We show that the optimal output electric power can reach $3.5\times 10^{4}W/{\mathrm{m}}^2$ for the system with a graphene---hexagonal-boron-nitride heterostructure emitter and a graphene-covered InSb cell, whereas the best efficiency is achieved by the system with the heterostructure emitter and an uncovered InSb cell (reaching to $27\%$ of the Carnot efficiency). These results show that the performances of near-field thermophotovoltaic systems can be comparable with or even superior than the state-of-art thermoelectric devices. The underlying physics for the significant enhancement of the thermophotovoltaic performance is understood as due to the resonant coupling between the emitter and the cell, where the surface plasmons in graphene and surface phonon-polaritons in boron-nitride play important roles. Our study provides a stepping stone for future high-performance thermophotovoltaic systems.

References in corpus (10)

• Optical properties of graphene
• Highly confined low-loss plasmons in graphene-boron nitride heterostructures
• Sub-diffractional, volume-confined polaritons in a natural hyperbolic material: hexagonal boron nitride
• Tunable light-matter interaction and the role of hyperbolicity in graphene-hBN system
• Radiative heat transfer between nanostructures
• Near-field heat transfer between graphene/hBN multilayers
• Graphene-on-silicon near-field thermophotovoltaic cell
• Enhancing efficiency and power of quantum-dots resonant tunneling thermoelectrics in three-terminal geometry by cooperative effects
• Near-field three-terminal thermoelectric heat engine
• Photonic Crystal Architecture for Room Temperature Equilibrium Bose-Einstein Condensation of Exciton-Polaritons

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Inelastic thermoelectric transport and fluctuations in mesoscopic system
• Photon Tunneling Reconstitution in Black Phosphorus/hBN Heterostructure
• Bi2Te3/Sb2Te3 Heterojunction and Thermophotovoltaic Cells Absorbing the Radiation from Room-temperature Surroundings
• Performance improvement of three-body radiative diode driven by graphene surface plasmon polaritons
• Multiple magnetoplasmon polaritons of magneto-optical graphene in near-field radiative heat transfer