Ultraefficient thermophotovoltaic power conversion by band-edge spectral filtering

Zunaid Omair; Gregg Scranton; Luis M Pazos-Outón; T Patrick Xiao; Myles A Steiner; Vidya Ganapati; Per F Peterson; John Holzrichter; Harry Atwater; Eli Yablonovitch

doi:10.1073/pnas.1903001116

Ultraefficient thermophotovoltaic power conversion by band-edge spectral filtering

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Jul 30;116(31):15356-15361. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1903001116. Epub 2019 Jul 16.

Authors

Zunaid Omair^{1

2}, Gregg Scranton^{1

2}, Luis M Pazos-Outón³, T Patrick Xiao^{1

2}, Myles A Steiner⁴, Vidya Ganapati⁵, Per F Peterson⁶, John Holzrichter⁷, Harry Atwater⁸, Eli Yablonovitch^{3

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
² Material Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720.
³ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; pazos@eecs.berkeley.edu eliy@eecs.berkeley.edu.
⁴ National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO 80401.
⁵ Department of Engineering, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
⁶ Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
⁷ Physical Insights Associates, Berkeley, CA 94705.
⁸ Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.

Abstract

Thermophotovoltaic power conversion utilizes thermal radiation from a local heat source to generate electricity in a photovoltaic cell. It was shown in recent years that the addition of a highly reflective rear mirror to a solar cell maximizes the extraction of luminescence. This, in turn, boosts the voltage, enabling the creation of record-breaking solar efficiency. Now we report that the rear mirror can be used to create thermophotovoltaic systems with unprecedented high thermophotovoltaic efficiency. This mirror reflects low-energy infrared photons back into the heat source, recovering their energy. Therefore, the rear mirror serves a dual function; boosting the voltage and reusing infrared thermal photons. This allows the possibility of a practical >50% efficient thermophotovoltaic system. Based on this reflective rear mirror concept, we report a thermophotovoltaic efficiency of 29.1 ± 0.4% at an emitter temperature of 1,207 °C.

Keywords: TPV; energy; photovoltaics; solar; thermophotovoltaics.