HOW TO TRAP THE SUN’S ENERGY THROUGH HEAT AS WELL AS LIGHT

A new approach to harvesting solar energy, 
developed by Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology (MIT) researchers, could improve 
efficiency by using sunlight to heat a high-temperature
 material whose infrared radiation would then be 
collected by a conventional photovoltaic cell.
 This technique could also make it easier to store the 
energy for later use, the researchers sayIn this case, 
adding the extra step improves performance,
 because it makes it
 possible to take advantage of wavelengths of 
light that ordinarily go to waste. The process is 
described in a paper published in Nature
 Nanotechnology,
 written by graduate student Andrej Lenert, 
assoc. prof. of mechanical engineering 
Evelyn Wang, physics professorMarin, principal 
research scientist Ivan and three others.
A conventionalsilicon-based solar cell 
“doesn’t take advantage
 of all the photons,” Wang explains. That’s because 
converting the energy of a photon into electricity 
requires that the photon’s energy level match
that of a characteristic of the photovoltaic (PV) 
material called a bandgap. Silicon’s bandgap 
responds to many wavelengths of light, but misses 
many others.

To address that limitation, the team inserted a two-layer absorber-emitter device—made of novel materials including carbon nanotubes and photonic crystals—between the sunlight and the PV cell. This intermediate material collects energy from a broad spectrum of sunlight, heating up in the process. When it heats up, as with a piece of iron that glows red hot, it emits light of a particular wavelength, which in this case is tuned to match the bandgap of the PV cell mounted nearby.

This basic concept has been explored for several years, since in theory such solar thermophotovoltaic (STPV) systems could provide a way to circumvent a theoretical limit on the energy-conversion efficiency of semiconductor-based photovoltaic devices. That limit, called the Shockley-Queisser limit, imposes a cap of 33.7% on such efficiency, but Wang says that with TPV systems, “the efficiency would be significantly higher—it could ideally be over 80%.”

There have been many practical obstacles to realizing that potential; previous experiments have been unable to produce a STPV device with efficiency of greater than 1%. But Lenert, Wang and their team have already produced an initial test device with a measured efficiency of 3.2%, and they say with further work they expect to be able to reach 20% efficiency—enough, they say, for a commercially viable product.

The design of the two-layer absorber-emitter material is key to this improvement. Its outer layer, facing the sunlight, is an array of multi-walled carbon nanotubes, which very efficiently absorbs the light’s energy and turns it to heat. This layer is bonded tightly to a layer of a photonic crystal, which is precisely engineered so that when it is heated by the attached layer of nanotubes, it “glows” with light whose peak intensity is mostly above the bandgap of the adjacent PV, ensuring that most of the energy collected by the absorber is then turned into electricity.

In their experiments, the researchers used simulated sunlight, and found that its peak efficiency came when its intensity was equivalent to a focusing system that concentrates sunlight by a factor of 750. This light heated the absorber-emitter to a temperature of 962 C.

This level of concentration is already much lower than in previous attempts at STPV systems, which concentrated sunlight by a factor of several thousand. But the MIT researchers say that after further optimization, it should be possible to get the same kind of enhancement at even lower sunlight concentrations, making the systems easier to operate.

Such a system, the team says, combines the advantages of solar photovoltaic systems, which turn sunlight directly into electricity, and solar thermal systems, which can have an advantage for delayed use because heat can be more easily stored than electricity. The new solar thermophotovoltaic systems, they say, could provide efficiency because of their broadband absorption of sunlight; scalability and compactness, because they are based on existing chip-manufacturing technology; and ease of energy storage, because of their reliance on heat.

Some of the ways to further improve the system are quite straightforward. Since the intermediate stage of the system, the absorber-emitter, relies on high temperatures, its size is crucial: The larger an object, the less surface area it has in relation to its volume, so heat losses decline rapidly with increasing size. The initial tests were done on a 1-cm chip, but follow-up tests will be done with a 10-cm chip, they say.

Source- MIT