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15-Fold increase in solar thermoelectric generator performance
A spectral engineering and thermal management strategy is developed to significantly increase STEG power generation. It consists of a fs-laser-treated W-SSA, a greenhouse chamber, and a fs-laser-treated μ-dissipator.
In contrast to conventional multistep coating and micro-fabrication technologies, fs-laser processing is a single-step, scalable, and simple subtractive technique that can be applied to a range of materials of complex geometry, including metals 32, 33, semiconductors 34, dielectrics 35, glass 36, and polymer 37. The optimized W-SSA exhibits a good solar spectrum weighted absorption of 0.9, which is about 3 times higher than a bare TEG with ceramic absorber (packaging material; \(\bar{\alpha }=0.29\)), maintaining an IR emissivity nearly as low as the untreated W (\(\bar{\varepsilon }=0.11\)). For instance, the IoT connects numerous sensor nodes in the physical world, allowing real-time data collection and immediate response to events in fields like weather, healthcare, and transportation 43.
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