Optoelectronic Analysis of Spectrally Selective Nanophotonic Metafilm Cell for Thermophotovoltaic Energy Conversion

TL;DR

This paper theoretically designs a spectrally selective nanophotonic TPV cell with enhanced in-band absorption and low sub-bandgap losses, predicting high efficiency and power output for thermophotovoltaic energy conversion.

Contribution

It introduces a novel nanophotonic metafilm cell structure with a sub-100-nm GaSb layer and incorporates a hole transport layer, achieving significant spectral absorption enhancement and high predicted efficiency.

Findings

Achieves nearly 20 times absorption enhancement at specific frequencies.

Predicts a TPV efficiency of 22.8% with 0.62 W/cm2 power output.

Efficiency could reach 28% with ideal emitter and no sub-bandgap photons.

Abstract

This work theoretically explores a spectrally selective TPV cell based on an asymmetric Fabry-Perot resonance cavity structure with sub-100-nm GaSb layer. The simulated spectral property of the ultrathin nanophotonic cell structure exhibits a high absorption peak above the bandgap due to the interference effect with electromagnetic field enhanced inside the GaSb layer between top and bottom silver electrodes, while the sub-bandgap absorption is as low as a few percent because of high reflectivity of the metal. An absorption enhancement nearly 20 times at particular frequency above bandgap is achieved within the sub-100-nm GaSb layer with the nanophotonic cell structure compared to the free-standing one. Besides, a thin layer of MoOx is incorporated into the metafilm cell structure as a hole transport layer to consider the charge collection in practice. With rigorous optoelectronic analysis by considering both radiative and nonradiative recombinations (Shockley-Reed-Hall and Auger), the nanophotonic cell is predicted to achieve a TPV efficiency of 22.8% and output power of 0.62 W/cm2 with a black emitter at 1500 K due to spectrally enhanced in-band absorption and low sub-bandgap absorption. With an ideal selective emitter which is hard to achieve in practice along with thermal stability concerns, the efficiency can be further improved to 28% by eliminating sub-bandgap photons. The proposed spectrally selective nanophotonic metafilm cell could be a viable route to achieve high-efficiency and low-cost TPV energy conversion.