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Abstract
Generally, waste heat is redundantly released into the surrounding by anthropogenic activities without strategized planning. Consequently, urban heat islands and global warming chronically increases over time. Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems can be potentially deployed to harvest waste heat and recuperate energy to tackle this global issue with supplementary generation of electrical energy. This paper presents a critical review on two dominant types of semiconductor materials, namely gallium antimonide (GaSb) and indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), as the potential candidates for TPV cells. The advantages and drawbacks of non-epitaxy and epitaxy growth methods are well-discussed based on different semiconductor materials. In addition, this paper critically examines and summarizes the electrical cell performance of TPV cells made of GaSb, InGaAs and other narrow bandgap semiconductor materials. The cell conversion efficiency improvement in terms of structural design and architectural optimization are also comprehensively analyzed and discussed. Lastly, the practical applications, current issues and challenges of TPV cells are critically reviewed and concluded with recommendations for future research. The highlighted insights of this review will contribute to the increase in effort towards development of future TPV systems with improved cell conversion efficiency.
Highlights
A few advantages of the GaSb semiconductor material compared to the other conventional materials such as silicon interface (Si), Ge are the direct bandgap properties with 0.72 eV energy at 300 K, and the cell performance is less affected at higher operating temperature [118]
indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) with lower bandgaps show a higher degree of Auger recombination, whereas excessive defects due to lattice-mismatched epitaxy cause a high level of Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH)
InGaAsSb is more promising as compared to GaSb and Ge, due to the high cell efficiency and its ability to operate in the low range blackbody temperature
Summary
InGaAs is a III-V ternary semiconductor compound of InAs and gallium arsenide (GaAs) that consists of indium and gallium group III elements, and arsenide group V element. A lattice-mismatched InGaAs with higher indium composition is designed to arrive at a lower bandgap. Laboratory, US (NREL) played a significant role in the collection and promulgation of TPV data, where TPV research on lattice-matched and lattice-mismatched InGaAs were introduced. Those studies involved the theoretical calculation, growth, fabrication and characterization of InGaAs TPV cells under solar and TPV spectrums. Several studies reported the crystal defects of lattice mismatch InGaAs cells for bandgap from 0.55 to 0.6 eV [155], characterization of the cell performances and optimization of the structure design [156,157,158,159]
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