Design and analysis of solar thermophotovoltaic systems

Solar thermophotovoltaic (STPV) is a light-electricity conversion system consisting of a solar concentrator, an emitter, a filter, PV cells and the cooling system. This paper is aimed at establishing a method for both purposes of design and performance analysis of the STPV device, which consists of a set of governing equations integrating all these components. The effects of several structural and operational parameters on the performance of the STPV system are investigated. The concentrator performance corresponding to the non-parallelism of solar rays, different aperture ratios and tracking errors is analyzed. A 3-D model is constructed to investigate heat transfer process in the thermo-electric conversion system. The performance of the spectral filter is studied. In addition, the effect of the cooling subsystem on the STPV is analyzed. Numerical simulation suggests that the emitter temperature seriously affects the system performance. An optimized non-periodic filter will remarkably improve the spectral efficiency of the STPV. As an example, an optimized design and analysis of the whole system is carried out in this article.