My Marie Curie project
This project was funded by the European Community in the framework of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship action, from September 2017 to September 2020.
The project title was "Novel hybrid thermoelectric photovoltaic devices: modeling, development, and characterization".
Actually the final scope of this project was to develop a solar hybrid thermoelectric - photovoltaic system and then evaluate its energy conversion capabilities.
See the Project Outcomes
See my MSCA chronicles
The main motivation for doing research on hybrid thermoelectric photovoltaic devices comes from the fact that in actual solar cells most of the incoming power is lost in the form of heat. This is the reason why solar cells heat up during operation, and this is also why nowadays solar cell conversion efficiencies are limited to 20-30% of the incoming solar power.
It follows that actual photovoltaic systems have a great potential of improvement with heat recovery. This is basically why thermal recovery approaches combined with solar cells (like cogeneration of warm water, thermophotovoltaics, or thermoelectrics) are becoming more and more popular.
There are mainly two approaches to the thermoelectric recovery of waste heat in solar cells.
The first is the spectrum splitting or (as I call it) the optically coupled approach. In this solution the solar light is split by means of a spectrum splitter in two part. The portion with high energy is then directed on the solar cell, while the infrared is deflected on a thermoelectric module covered by an absorber material (called selective absorber - see figure).
The second is instead the thermally coupled approach consisting in the combination of a solar cell with a thermoelectric generator simply placing them in thermal contact with each other (see figure).
My project is focused on the development of optimized thermally coupled hybrid thermoelectric photovoltaic devices.
Even if it could look pretty simple, the realization of an efficient thermally coupled system is a difficult task. Actually commercial solar cells and commercial thermoelectric generators are not build to work together. Thus if one tries to combine commercially available systems the final efficiencies are very small. The only solution is to build special solar cells and thermoelectric generators with layout and parameters able to give a beneficial hybridization.