Selective emitters design and optimization for thermophotovoltaic applications

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and optimization of selective emitters for thermophotovoltaic systems, demonstrating structures that significantly improve efficiency beyond traditional limits.

Contribution

It introduces numerical tools for designing layered selective emitters and shows their potential to surpass conventional photovoltaic efficiency limits.

Findings

Designed multilayer emitter structures with enhanced spectral selectivity

Achieved efficiency improvements over standard PV devices

Demonstrated potential to exceed Shockley-Queisser limits

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.