Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 6, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9685
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship
- [23-01763]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [26246017] Funding Source: KAKEN
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The direct conversion of solar energy to electricity can be broadly separated into two main categories: photovoltaics and thermal photovoltaics, where the former utilizes gradients in electrical potential and the latter thermal gradients. Conventional thermal photovoltaics has a high theoretical efficiency limit (84%) but in practice cannot be easily miniaturized and is limited by the engineering challenges of sustaining large (>1,000 K) temperature gradients. Here we show a hot-carrier-based thermophotonic solar cell, which combines the compact nature of photovoltaic devices with the potential to reach the high-efficiency regime of thermal photovoltaics. In the device, a thermal gradient of 500 K is established by hot electrons, under Stokes illumination, rather than by raising the temperature of the material itself. Under anti-Stokes (sub-bandgap) illumination we observe a thermal gradient of similar to 20 K, which is maintained by steady-state Auger heating of carriers and corresponds to a internal thermal up-conversion efficiency of 30% between the collector and solar cell.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available