Coupled Charge and Radiation Transport Processes in Thermophotovoltaic and Thermoradiative Cells [electronic resource]

• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 621.31 Generation, modification, storage, transmission of electric power
• Thông tin xuất bản: Golden, Colo. : Oak Ridge, Tenn. : National Renewable Energy Laboratory (U.S.) ; Distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy, 2021
• Mô tả vật lý: Size: Article No. 054035 : , digital, PDF file.
• Bộ sưu tập: Metadata
• ID: 255571
• Chủ đề: 1. 30 direct energy conversion; 2. 71 classical and quantum mechanics, general physics; 3. Charge transport; 4. Near-field; 5. Near-field thermal radiation; 6. Semiconductor; 7. Thermophotovoltaic; 8. Thermoradiative; 9. Thermoradiative cell

Tóm tắt

Accurate modeling of charge transport and both thermal and luminescent radiation is crucial to the understanding and design of radiative thermal energy converters. Charge-carrier dynamics in semiconductors are well-described by the Poisson-drift-diffusion equations, and thermal radiation in emitter-absorber structures can be computed using multilayer fluctuational electrodynamics. These two types of energy flows interact through radiation absorption or luminescence and charge-carrier generation or recombination. However, past research has typically only assumed limited interaction, with thermal radiation absorption as an input for charge-carrier models to predict device performance. To examine this assumption, we develop a fully coupled iterative model of charge and radiation transport in semiconductor devices, and we use our model to analyze near-field and far-field GaSb thermophotovoltaic and thermoradiative systems. By comparing our results with past methods that do not consider cross-influences between charge and radiation transport, we find that a fully coupled approach is necessary to accurately model photon recycling and near-field enhancement of external luminescence. As these effects can substantially alter device performance, our modeling approach can aid in the design of efficient thermophotovoltaic and thermoradiative systems.