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

Abstract

Abstract Germanium telluride (GeTe) having a direct bandgap of 0.6 eV has mainly been used 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 demonstrated a single-junction GeTe thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell based on device transport model with np structure at the black body and cell temperature of 1775 and 300 K, respectively. 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 cm−2, 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.