학술논문

A Dual-Junction Thermophotovoltaic System Based on Tamm Plasmon Thermal Emitter
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices IEEE Trans. Electron Devices Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on. 71(3):2058-2063 Mar, 2024
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Photonic band gap
Photonics
Plasmons
Voltage
Junctions
Distributed Bragg reflectors
Current density
Dual-junction tandem cell
Tamm plasmon
thermophotovoltaic (TPV) system
wavelength-selective emitter
Language
ISSN
0018-9383
1557-9646
Abstract
Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology plays a significant role in energy harvesting because it can efficiently convert radiative thermal energy into electricity. However, only the portion of emitted energy higher than the bandgap of PV cells are effective, and photons with energy that greatly exceeds the bandgap inevitably lead to thermalization loss, hence the efficiencies of previously reported TPV systems still remain lower than the theoretical limit. This work proposes a dual-junction TPV system based on a Tamm plasmon multilayer emitter, which utilizes the advantages of selective emission and multijunction conversion. In the system, each sub-cell can absorb and utilize more photons, and also reduce the non-absorption loss of sub-bandgap photons. In consideration of thermalization loss, the proposed TPV system yields a maximum efficiency of 19.36%, which greatly exceeds the single-junction TPV systems having 8% (GaSb) and 8.37% (GaInAsSb). This work is beneficial for the design of high-efficiency TPV systems based on Tamm emitters and multijunction cells.