Addendum: A nanophotonic solar thermophotovoltaic device.

A nanophotonic solar thermophotovoltaic device.

The most common approaches to generating power from sunlight are either photovoltaic, in which sunlight directly excites electron-hole pairs in a semiconductor, or solar-thermal, in which sunlight drives a mechanical heat engine. Photovoltaic power generation is intermittent and typically only exploits a portion of the solar spectrum efficiently, whereas the intrinsic irreversibilities of small...

Final Report for the GCEP Project: Ultra High Efficiency Thermo-Photovoltaic Solar Cells Using Metallic Photonic Crystals As Intermediate Absorber and Emitter

We have achieved significant accomplishments on the developments of nanophotonic absorber and emitter structures for solar thermal photovoltaic applications. The highlight include: (1) The first computational design of a realistic nanophotonic absorber and emitter structures that enable system efficiency beyond the ShockleyQueisser limit. We have provided the first computational design of a Tun...

Unidirectional radiative heat transfer with a spectrally selective planar absorber/emitter for high-efficiency solar thermophotovoltaic systems

Nanophotonic resonators for InP solar cells.

We describe high efficiency thin-film InP solar cells that utilize a periodic array of TiO2 nanocylinders. These nanophotonic resonators are found to reduce the solar-weighted average reflectivity of an InP solar cell to ~1.3%, outperforming the best double-layer antireflection coatings. The coupling between Mie scattering resonances and thin-film interference effects accurately desc...

Using Plasmonic Photonic Crystals to Produce Highly Efficient Thermophotovoltaic Solar Cells