Thermophotovoltaic technology development at Essential Research, Inc.

Garverick, L. M.; Fatemi, Navid S.; Jenkins, Phillip P.

doi:10.1063/1.54767

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, just a few references to practical implementation of STPV systems are found. In this regard, highlighted are the work carried out in the mid-1990s by the US aerospace manufacturer McDonnell Douglas (later merged with Boeing in 1997) [17,18,4,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] and by EDTEK Inc. during the early 2000s [28]. However, in these references, an experimental solar-to-electricity efficiency is not reported for the full system, either because most of the tests were performed on test bed units but not on complete STPV systems (in the case of the McDonnell Douglas system) or because of the failure of different components that prevented operating the system under full sun-power conditions (EDTEK system).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development and experimental evaluation of a complete solar thermophotovoltaic system

Datas

Algora

2012

Progress in Photovoltaics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present a practical implementation of a solar thermophotovoltaic (TPV) system. The system presented in this paper comprises a sunlight concentrator system, a cylindrical cup-shaped absorber/emitter (made of tungsten coated with HÍO2), and an hexagonal-shaped water-cooled TPV generator comprising 24 germanium TPV cells, which is surrounding the cylindrical absorber/emitter. This paper focuses on the development of shingled TPV cell arrays, the characterization of the sunlight concentrator system, the estimation of the temperature achieved by the cylindrical emitters operated under concentrated sunlight, and the evaluation of the full system performance under real outdoor irradiance conditions. From the system characterization, we have measured short-circuit current densities up to 0.95 A/cm 2 , electric power densities of 67 mW/cm , and a global conversion efficiency of about 0.8%. To our knowledge, this is the first overall solar-to-electricity efficiency reported for a complete solar thermophotovoltaic system. The very low efficiency is mainly due to the overheating of the cells (up to 120 °C) and to the high optical concentrator losses, which prevent the achievement of the optimum emitter temperature. The loss analysis shows that by improving both aspects, efficiencies above 5% could be achievable in the very short term and efficiencies above 10% could be achieved with further improvements.

show abstract