uri physics colloquium

Thermal Photonics in Energy

Yi Zheng, Ph.D. Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Systems Engineering ,University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI

abstract

The fascinating nature of photonic nanomaterials has opened the door to novel approaches for conducting research in the field of energy conversion, storage and cooling technology. The ability to control thermal conductive and radiative properties of objects is of great interest in diverse areas like solar and thermophotovoltaic energy conversion, wavelength selective reflection and thermal emission/absorption, novel photon-based radiative cooling, and camouflage in military applications. Thermal transport of nanoengineered materials gets enhanced dramatically in comparison to their bulk counterparts. Thermal radiation at the nanometer scale is significantly different from classical or macroscopic radiative transport since near-field effects such as interference, diffraction, and tunneling of surface waves play a significant role.

Small-scale thermal transport has shown great potential and applications for use in manipulating macroscale energy systems and thermal sensing. This talk will mainly focus on small-scale energy transport due to surface photon and/or phonon polaritons through five research projects: (1) A dyadic Green’s function formalism has been developed to determine the roles of nanoparticles in thermal radiative property (e.g. spectral emissivity); (2) Mie-resonance metamaterials have been studied and designed for wavelength selective thermal emitters in order to increase energy conversion efficiency in solar energy harvesting; (3) Near-field enhanced thermal diodes and transistors have been investigated using phase-change periodic photonic metamaterials; (4) Metamaterials-based thermal infrared biosensor has been proposed for ocean monitoring and early detection of cancer biomarkers; (5) Enhanced thermal conductivity of nanoparticle-nanofiber composites has been studied experimentally and analytically.