Thermal radiation is one of the most universal physical phenomena, and its study has played a key role in the history of modern physics. Our understanding of this subject has been traditionally bas...

Radiative Heat Transfer

The past five years have seen significant cost reductions in photovoltaics and a correspondingly strong increase in uptake, with photovoltaics now positioned to provide one of the lowest-cost options for future electricity generation. What is becoming clear as the industry develops is that area-related costs, such as costs of encapsulation and field-installation, are increasingly important components of the total costs of photovoltaic electricity generation, with this trend expected to continue. Improved energy-conversion efficiency directly reduces such costs, with increased manufacturing volume likely to drive down the additional costs associated with implementing higher efficiencies. This suggests the industry will evolve beyond the standard single-junction solar cells that currently dominate commercial production, where energy-conversion efficiencies are fundamentally constrained by Shockley-Queisser limits to practical values below 30%. This Review assesses the overall prospects for a range of approaches that can potentially exceed these limits, based on ultimate efficiency prospects, material requirements and developmental outlook.

Energy conversion approaches and materials for high-efficiency photovoltaics

Extensive literature and publications on intermediate band solar cells (IBSCs) are reviewed. A detailed discussion is given on the thermodynamics of solar energy conversion in IBSCs, the device physics, and the carrier dynamics processes with a particular emphasis on the two-step inter-subband absorption/recombination processes that are of paramount importance in a successful implementation high-efficiency IBSC. The experimental solar cell performance is further discussed, which has been recently demonstrated by using highly mismatched alloys and high-density quantum dot arrays and superlattice. IBSCs having widely different structures, materials, and spectral responses are also covered, as is the optimization of device parameters to achieve maximum performance.

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Intermediate band solar cells: Recent progress and future directions

Interest in new thermal diodes, regulators, and switches has been rapidly growing because these components have the potential for rich transport phenomena that cannot be achieved using traditional thermal resistors and capacitors. Each of these thermal components has a signature functionality: Thermal diodes can rectify heat currents, thermal regulators can maintain a desired temperature, and thermal switches can actively control the heat transfer. Here, we review the fundamental physical mechanisms of switchable and nonlinear heat transfer which have been harnessed to make thermal diodes, switches, and regulators. The review focuses on experimental demonstrations, mainly near room temperature, and spans the fields of heat conduction, convection, and radiation. We emphasize the changes in thermal properties across phase transitions and thermal switching using electric and magnetic fields. After surveying fundamental mechanisms, we present various nonlinear and active thermal circuits that are based on ana...

Thermal diodes, regulators, and switches: Physical mechanisms and potential applications

https://escholarship.org/content/qt2xf0c3gx/qt2xf0c3gx.pdf?t=pxd659

Recent progresses on physics and applications of vanadium dioxide

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) exhibits a phase-change behavior from the insulating state to the metallic state around 340 K. By using this effect, we experimentally demonstrate a radiative thermal rectifier in the far-field regime with a thin film VO2 deposited on the silicon wafer. A rectification contrast ratio as large as two is accurately obtained by utilizing a one-dimensional steady-state heat flux measurement system. We develop a theoretical model of the thermal rectifier with optical responses of the materials retrieved from the measured mid-infrared reflection spectra, which is cross-checked with experimentally measured heat flux. Furthermore, we tune the operating temperatures by doping the VO2 film with tungsten (W). These results open up prospects in the fields of thermal management and thermal information processing.

Experimental investigation of radiative thermal rectifier using vanadium dioxide

Dynamic control of electromagnetic heat transfer without changing mechanical configuration opens possibilities in intelligent thermal management in nanoscale systems. We confirmed by experiment that the radiative heat transfer is dynamically modulated beyond the blackbody limit. The near-field electromagnetic heat exchange mediated by phonon–polariton is controlled by the metal–insulator transition of tungsten-doped vanadium dioxide. The functionalized heat flux is transferred over an area of 1.6 cm2 across a 370 nm gap, which is maintained by the microfabricated spacers and applied pressure. The uniformity of the gap is validated by optical interferometry, and the measured heat transfer is well modeled as the sum of the radiative and the parasitic conductive components. The presented methodology to form a nanometric gap with functional heat flux paves the way to the smart thermal management in various scenes ranging from highly integrated systems to macroscopic apparatus.

Dynamic Modulation of Radiative Heat Transfer beyond the Blackbody Limit.

Thermal information processing is attracting much interest as an analog of electronic computing. We experimentally demonstrated a radiative thermal memory utilizing a phase change material. The hysteretic metal-insulator transition of vanadium dioxide (VO2) allows us to obtain a multilevel memory. We developed a Preisach model to explain the hysteretic radiative heat transfer between a VO2 film and a fused quartz substrate. The transient response of our memory predicted by the Preisach model agrees well with the measured response. Our multilevel thermal memory paves the way for thermal information processing as well as contactless thermal management.

Multilevel radiative thermal memory realized by the hysteretic metal-insulator transition of vanadium dioxide

The hot-carrier solar cell (HC-SC) is an ambitious approach to solar energy conversion which in principle can achieve high efficiency (84%) from a single bandgap semiconductor. Here we propose a method of utilising hot-carriers within a photovoltaic device in which energy is extracted optically from a hot-carrier distribution rather than through the usual approach of electrical conduction. Depending on the optical extraction rate, the concept proposed here may attain an upper efficiency approaching that of the conventional HC-SC.

A hot-carrier solar cell with optical energy selective contacts

To realize highly efficient intermediate-band (IB) solar cells, long lifetime of photo-generated carriers in the IB is essential. For this purpose, we propose a concept for IB absorbers using GaAs wall-inserted type II InAs quantum-dots (QDs), in which electrons at the IB of the InAs QDs and holes in the valence band of the GaAsSb layers are farther separated compared to those in conventional type II QDs. We fabricated InAs/GaAs/GaAs0.82Sb0.18 type II QDs and performed time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy. The obtained lifetime was as long as 220 ns for electrons at the IB.

Kazutaka Nishikawa

Papers

Experimental investigation of radiative thermal rectifier using vanadium dioxide

Dynamic Modulation of Radiative Heat Transfer beyond the Blackbody Limit.

Multilevel radiative thermal memory realized by the hysteretic metal-insulator transition of vanadium dioxide

A hot-carrier solar cell with optical energy selective contacts

Extremely long carrier lifetime over 200 ns in GaAs wall-inserted type II InAs quantum dots