WPTherml: A Python Package for the Design of Materials for Harnessing Heat

Abstract

<p>WPTherml is a Python package for the design of materials with tailored optical and thermal properties for the vast number of energy applications where control of absorption and emission of radiation, or conversion of heat to radiation or vice versa, is paramount. The optical properties are treated within classical electrodynamics via the Transfer Matrix Method which rigorously solve Maxwell's equations for layered isotropic media. A flexible multilayer class connects rigorous electrodynamics properties to figures of merit for a variety of thermal applications, and facilitates extensions to other applications for greater reuse potential. WPTherml can be accessed at https://github.com/FoleyLab/wptherml. </p>

High-Temperature Selective Emitter Design and Materials: Titanium Aluminum Nitride Alloys for Thermophotovoltaics

“…In each optimization, 100 generations of population size 100 were generated; in each generation, 20 couples of chromosomes were randomly selected for crossover and each chromosome had a 7% chance of mutation of a single, randomly selected gene in a given generation. The η S , P , and η TPV figures of merit are computed in first mapping the chromosomes back to their corresponding thin-film multilayer structure and computing the reflection, transmission, and emissivity using the Transfer Matrix Method (eqs S14–S21), and finally using the thermal emission spectrum to compute the figures of merit by eqs ,, and S5–S10); the software package WPTherml − was used to perform these calculations of the optical properties and figures of merit. In each generation, the two chromosomes with the highest values of η TPV are propagated to the next generation and the chromosome with the overall highest value of η TPV is used as the basis for experimental realization.…”

Efficient Thin Polymer Coating as a Selective Thermal Emitter for Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling

“…The analytical model to determine the cooling power was prepared in python with suggestions taken from wptherml package, and the graphs demonstrated were prepared by using matplotlib and Origin 9.1. 52 Outdoor Experiment Setup. A simple glass Petri dish enclosure with thin polyethylene film of 13 μm thickness as convective barrier, and Styrofoam insulators were used to carry out the outdoor experiment.…”