RE: [Vo]:Heat/light hybrid solar cells

[Jones Beene]

There is at least one common material – SiC (it may be unique) which can be 
fabricated to convert blackbody to quasi monochromatic IR.

 

There are a number of papers about this, but the first one that pops up is 
“Extraordinary Coherent Thermal Emission From SiC Due to Coupled Resonant 
Cavities” Nev, et al

 

From: Eric Walker 

 

Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:

 

The idea seems to be that you put a collector made of nanotubes and 
nanophotonic crystals in front of the cell and it "transforms" the incoming 
sunlight from a mishmosh of frequencies into a nearly monochromatic beam, whose 
frequency is centered on the band the cell can convert.

 

This sounds like a blackbody-to-monochromatic light converter. Will physical 
principles allow such a thing without expenditure of energy?

 

Eric

 

Re: [Vo]:Heat/light hybrid solar cells

[Eric Walker]

On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Stephen A. Lawrence 
wrote:

The idea seems to be that you put a collector made of nanotubes and
> nanophotonic crystals in front of the cell and it "transforms" the incoming
> sunlight from a mishmosh of frequencies into a nearly monochromatic beam,
> whose frequency is centered on the band the cell can convert.
>

This sounds like a blackbody-to-monochromatic light converter. Will
physical principles allow such a thing without expenditure of energy?

Eric

[Vo]:Heat/light hybrid solar cells

[Stephen A. Lawrence]

This idea has been kicking around for close to a decade but this is 
apparently the first time it's been demonstrated with actual solar cells 
and actual sunlight.


The idea seems to be that you put a collector made of nanotubes and 
nanophotonic crystals in front of the cell and it "transforms" the 
incoming sunlight from a mishmosh of frequencies into a nearly 
monochromatic beam, whose frequency is centered on the band the cell can 
convert.


This is supposed to allow the cells to break the 32% barrier, which is 
the theoretical limit for a single-layer cell, or so they say (I sure 
don't know enough semiconductor physics to critique that statement).


('Course the whole system needs to be operated at about 1000 C which 
might impose some limitations on where you could deploy it.)


Brief article here (original paper was in /Nature Energy/):

http://news.mit.edu/2016/hot-new-solar-cell-0523