Enhancing the optical efficiency of a thermophotovoltaic generator using square cones in combination with interference filters

The optical efficiency is a week link in all TPV systems. Many different approaches have been studied earlier, but not much on the possibility to use interference filters. Such filters can be designed to get alsmost any desired optical performance, as long as it is allowed to use a large number of layers in the multilayer stack. In practical applications this is very often not acceptable. Nevertheless such filters can still be quite good, at least for a very narrow range of incident angles. Therefore a double-cone geometry is proposed to be used in combination with such filters. This geometry will limit the range of incident angles onto the filter, which will then act more efficiently. The influence of the geometry is evaluated by means of model experiments, and a computer program has been constructed to be able to simulate this type of geometry using ray-tracing technique.