Thermoelectrics, Photovoltaics and Thermal Photovoltaics for Powering ICT Devices and Systems

摘要

The conversion of heat into electricity through the thermoelectric effect and light intoudelectricity through photovoltaic solar cells both allow useful amounts of power for audrange of ICT systems from a few milli-Watts (mW) for autonomous sensors up to kiloWattsud(kW) for complete ICT computing or entertainment systems. Photovoltaics at theudlarge scale can also be used to produce MW power stations suitable for the sustainableudpowering of high-performance computing (HPC) and dataservers for cloud computing.udThis chapter provides a background to the physics of operation of both types of sustainableudenergy sources along with the fundamental limits of both technologies. The presentudperformance is presented along with promising research directions to allow for a comparisonudof the useful power along with the limits for deployment of each approach toudpower ICT devices and systems. Finally, the developing field of thermal photovoltaics isudreviewed, where the overall thermodynamic conversion efficiency of turning light intoudelectricity and useful heat can be increased through the addition of thermoelectrics orudheat transfer modules to a photovoltaic cell.