Selective solar absorbers generally have limited effectiveness in unconcentrated sunlight, because of eradiation losses over a broad range of wavelengths and angles. However, metamaterials offer the potential to limit radiation exchange to a proscribed range of angles and wavelengths, which has the potential to dramatically boost performance. After globally optimizing one particular class of such designs, we find thermal transfer efficiencies of 78% at temperatures over 1,000°C, with overall system energy conversion efficiencies of 37%, exceeding the Shockley-Quiesser efficiency limit of 31% for photovoltaic conversion under unconcentrated sunlight. This represents a 250% increase in efficiency and 94% decrease in selective emitter area compared to a standard, angular-insensitive selective absorber. © 2011 Bermel et al; licensee Springer.
CITATION STYLE
Bermel, P., Ghebrebrhan, M., Harradon, M., Yeng, Y. X., Celanovic, I., Joannopoulos, J. D., & Soljacic, M. (2011). Tailoring photonic metamaterial resonances for thermal radiation. Nanoscale Research Letters, 6, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1186/1556-276X-6-549
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