Effects of Multispectral Absorbing Coating on the Generated Voltage of Solar Radiation–Thermoelectric System.

The effective utilization of solar energy is an important development direction to realize the exploration of clean energy. Herein, a model of solar radiation–thermoelectric generation (TEG) system is established, which is composed of solar absorbing coating and TEG component. Five different microscopic structures of coating are designed and the spectral absorption properties are numerically analyzed with the finite‐difference time‐domain method. Then, the absorbed solar energy and produced open‐circuit voltage with different coating structures are compared, with the coupling calculation of temperature field and electromagnetic field achieved. Additionally, the effects of structural size parameters on the output voltage performance are discussed. It can be observed that the absorbing coating can effectively improve the performance of TEG component, and the multilayer structure with appropriate gold particle diameter chosen is an optimization research direction for more efficient energy conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]