A new heat engine is highly efficient and designed to work in tandem with renewable sources of energy.
The electrons in this thermophotovoltaic cell are located within its alloys, which are stacked atop each other like the layers of a cake. The cell is made from two layers of semiconducting alloys and one reflective layer of gold. The alloys in this experiment were chosen according to the wavelength of the photons required to fuel the cell at its highest efficiency.
The position of the alloys within the heat engine was also an important factor. The first layer was designed to have the largest band gap in order to capture the highest-energy photons. Photons not captured by the first layer then fall through to the second layer and push electrons across a smaller band gap.
“We were sending electricity to a resistive heater that was a few feet away,” Henry explained. This resistive heater was like a complex lightbulb filament—a conductor that glows and becomes superheated when energy passes through it. The hot, glowing metal released photons that were captured by the alloy layers, which generated electricity in the heat engine; the researchers found that an element heated to between 3,452 and 4,352 degrees Fahrenheit provided them with the best efficiency.
“We would want to go take a look during annual maintenance, and so you just cool the system down, or cool a portion of it down, and send someone in,” Henry told me. “If you had some emergency, you could cool the system down and send someone in with essentially scuba gear and an oxygen tank.
. It’s a promising result, and Henry and his colleagues are now striving for an even bigger goal: scaling this technology to a warehouse-sized power station that could be patched into the existing grid.
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