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Application of near field radiation in thermophotovoltaic energy conversion system

Yue Yang Assistant Professor, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China.

It has been demonstrated during the last decade that

radiative transfer could be significantly enhanced when the distance between two objects is smaller than the characteristic thermal wavelength due to photon tunneling or coupling of evanescent waves. In particular, the near-field radiative flux could far exceed the blackbody limit by the coupling of additional resonance modes. On the other hand, similar to photovoltaic panel, the thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy conversion system, which consists of two main components of thermal emitter and TPV cell, is also a direct energy conversion process from heat to electricity through electron–hole pair generation from absorbed thermal radiation. The advantages of TPV systems include versatile thermal sources and high conversion efficiency potential, which makes it an important component of renewable energy conversion, while the power output and conversion efficiency achieved are still very low currently.  However, the greatly enhanced radiative heat transfer in near field provides the possibility to improve power output and conversion efficiency of current TPV systems, and a near-field TPV system has been rapidly developed for the past decade.

In this talk, we will firstly introduce some additional resonance modes to further enhance radiative heat transfer in near field, including commonly used surface plasmon/phonon polariton [1], recently developed hyperbolic modes [2], metamaterial based ones [2,3], and magnetic polariton [4,5], which was firstly discovered by us recently. Taking advantage of these mechanisms in enhancing near field radiative heat transfer, we also improved the power output and conversion efficiency of a near-field TPV system by carefully designing metamaterial based thermal emitters, like multilayer structure [6], nanowire based one [7], and nano gratings [8]. To summarize, combining the advantages of both metamaterial based thermal emitter and enhanced radiation in near field would benefit a lot for improving the performance of TPV energy conversion, and we hope this talk could provide some hints on this direction.