Surface structure for manipulating the near-field spectral radiative transfer of thermophotovoltaics

Abstract

To improve the efficiency and output power of the nano-gap thermophotovoltaic (TPV) power generation system, surface rectangular grating structures are added to the top surface of the group Ⅲ-V semiconductor cell to control the spectrum of near-field radiative transfer. Doped zinc oxide that supports surface waves at near-infrared wavelengths is selected as the TPV emitter. When paired with GaSb grating structures, the surface plasmon polariton excited by the emitter and the light trapping effect by the grating tunnels will be coupled, which results in a significantly and selectively enhanced near-field radiative heat flux within a narrow spectral region above the cell bandgap, thereby fulfilling the design purpose. This physical mechanism is explained by a direct finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation based on the Langevin approach. The material volume meshgrids filled with random dipole sources can act as the thermal emission source and the radiative heat flux is calculated by solving the Maxwell equations numerically. The spectral results show that adding rectangular grating structures to GaSb not only increases radiative transfer in the expected wavelength region over the unstructured case, resulting in a heat flux surpassing that of a far-field blackbody source at the same temperature, but also suppresses the unwanted long-wavelength heat flux that causes radiative loss and cell heating. With a vacuum gap of 200 nm between the emitter and the cell, using a bulk GaSb cell with rectangular gratings can double the spectral flux of the blackbody emitter case, and using an ultrathin GaSb cell with surface structures and back reflectors further increases this ratio to 2.84 due to the total internal reflection controlled by the cell thickness. The amplitude and wavelength of the spectral peak are controlled by the grating size parameters. Low filling ratio gratings with lower-aspect-ratio grating channels generally have sharper enhancement peaks but lower total radiative heat flux, while high filling ratio structures with higher-aspect-ratio channels have better heat flux improvement but might also result in lower conversion efficiency due to the broader spectrum. The rigorous approach reveals the detailed physical mechanism that is otherwise unseen with effective medium approaches for inhomogeneous structures or the Derjaguin proximity approximation. Overall the results of this study enable an enhancement of near-field radiative heat flux limited within a narrow wavelength range shorter than the cell bandgap, offering practical benefit to the application of TPV power generation with higher feasible power and conversion efficiency.