Exploring the potential of GeTe for the application in Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell

TL;DR

This study investigates GeTe's electronic properties and demonstrates a GeTe-based thermophotovoltaic cell with promising efficiency, highlighting its potential for energy conversion applications.

Contribution

The paper provides first-principles calculations of GeTe's electronic structure and designs a GeTe TPV cell with optimized performance, a novel application of GeTe in TPV technology.

Findings

GeTe has a theoretical bandgap of 0.69 eV close to experimental values.

The GeTe TPV cell achieved an efficiency of 7.9%.

The device showed a JSC of 16.16 A/cm2, VOC of 0.360 V, and FF of 75.51%.

Abstract

Germanium telluride (GeTe) having a direct bandgap of 0.6 eV has mainly been in phase change memory and thermoelectric power generation. In this article, we study the electronic structure of the GeTe by first-principles calculations. The theoretical direct bandgap of GeTe was found to be 0.69 eV which is very close to the experimental value. Then, we demonstrate a single-junction GeTe thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell based on device transport model with np structure. The device was optimized for the higher performance of the TPV cell. The GeTe TPV cell exhibited an efficiency of 7.9% with JSC=16.16 A/cm2, VOC=0.360 V and FF=75.51%, respectively. These results indicate that GeTe could be a promising material for the fabrication of efficient TPV cell.